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Musically, "Nightlife" seems to be taking off from "Saturday Night Forever," a piece of classic disco that closed the Pets' last album, "Bilingual" (1996). Though "Nightlife" boasts the work of producers like Craig Armstrong (who has worked with Massive Attack), Rollo and David Morales, it owes less to what's happening in house music and drum 'n' bass than it does to the disco of the late '70s and early '80s, most explicitly on "New York City Boy," a pumping Village People homage replete with butch male chorus. But "New York City Boy" is a celebration of being young and on the loose in Manhattan (going to clubs, buying the hottest remixes), and the rest of "Nightlife" concerns itself almost exclusively with mature romantic disappointment.

Pet Shop Boys "Nightlife" Sire

The title "Nightlife" implies time out with drinks, laughs, friends; but the mood of the album is much more akin to the bookends of those good times -- the expectation of getting ready to go out (almost always better than the real thing) and the letdown of coming in afterwards. "Never been closer to heaven/Never been farther away," the Pets sing on one track. That's the expectation and disappointment of night life (and "Nightlife") in a nutshell. That Pet Shop Boys have chosen to explore this territory on an album whose sound -- a huge, steady, unstoppable beat with short bursts of strings used as rhythmic punctuation -- harks back to the moment of dance music's greatest popularity is the kind of tension and contrast they specialize in; it's like the way (on 1993's "Very") they recast the "See You in San Francisco" utopia of the Village People's "Go West" as "See You in Valhalla" mournfulness.

You hear the tension of "Nightlife" on the opening track, "For Your Own Good," a plea directed to a lover to stay in instead of going out clubbing. "Life isn't easy/So why don't you stay/With the lover you need/And not the devil you pay," Tennant sings, capturing something of the if-you-have-to-ask-you-know-the-answer naiveté of the Shirelles' "Will You Love Me Tomorrow?" Right behind the plaintiveness of his vocal you hear the irresistible allure of a disco beat. In echo to his singing "come on, call me," you hear the same line sung by a black diva (Sylvia Mason-James) -- a siren song to the night life, against which his offer of loving domesticity doesn't stand a chance.

The feel of "Nightlife" would be nostalgic if it weren't so downbeat. There's real poignancy in Pet Shop Boys' juxtaposition of music that calls up a youthful past with an adult state of mind. Coming home from a club with a pounding head, wondering if you imagined the signals you picked up from a special stranger -- as does the man in "Radiophonic" -- feels very different in your 40s than in your 20s; romance may still be as perplexing, but there's something melancholy (and humorous) in having had time to become familiar with the doubts.

Hope in these songs is as evanescent as the dream staircase made of cigarette smoke in "Deep in a Dream" -- like on "Footsteps," the gorgeous lullaby of uncertainty that closes the album (a song that could be heard as a prequel to the old standard "Cottage for Sale"). On "Only One," Tennant sings "It's just that now and then you smile/And suddenly I know you care/And I'm the only one," and he takes a pause just long enough for the warmth of that realization to sink in before adding, "for a while." At moments like this, Tennant, with his high, clear, lovely voice, a voice that has overcome its thinness to seem more expressive with each new album, might be a world-weary version of the Fleetwoods' Gary Troxel, whose tenor was the most keening voice of romantic longing in '50s pop.

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