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Please
Please is the first PSB album and has their very biggest hit as well. Their sound was still distinct for those days, in part because of Neil Tennant's extremely distinctive voice. The sound was later to become even more distinctive with orchestral voices including harp sounds, brass and strings. There are a few songs here that come across as filler, but it also has some great songs and some original sounds. One thing that was distinctive about this cd were the intros to some of the songs that sounded very different from the rest of the song.

"Two Divided By Zero" is an interesting song to start things out. It's not particularly special with a beat that's almost dancey but not quite. The synthesized voice chanting out the title of the song gives it a unique feel, though. "West End Girls" is the most well-known song of all of PSB's work. The chanted vocals were never too exciting to me, but since it is a classic, I do sometimes listen to it. It's not really my thing, though. I prefer the next song, "Opportunities (Let's Make Lots of Money)" which has a wonderful introduction that segues smoothly into the hard-hitting beat that makes up the rest of the song. Apparently this song placed disappointingly in the charts, but I remember it well enough and I always liked it better than "West End Girls".

"Love Comes Quickly" is more of a filler piece, but the next two tracks, "Suburbia" and "Tonight is Forever" are both wonderful, though. The synthetic dogs on "Suburbia" are fun to hear, although the entire song is one of my favorites, and "Tonight" has an incredibly complex and interesting introduction before it turns into a moody and exciting dance track.

Unfortunately, most of the rest of the album is fairly samey and somewhat boring. "Violence" is just plain bad, with really cheesy synth sounds and preachy, cliched chanted vocals. Absolutely nothing to recommend it. "I Want a Lover," "Later Tonight" and "Why Don't We Live Together" are somewhat boring and I really don't listen to them unless I'm really, really lazy about hitting the stop button and putting something else in.

All in all, it was a good first effort, with some marvelous songs but a few rough edges in the form of characterless filler tracks. This problem was mostly alleviated in the next work, which is probably the best PSB ever did.