TORONTO -- Before last night's sold-out show at Massey Hall, Pet Shop Boys frontman Neil Tennant joked to The Toronto Sun it would be "a stand-up, sit-down show."

Well, it was actually more sit-down than stand-up for the first half of the Pet Shop Boys' 95-minute, polished performance. Tennant, often on acoustic guitar, and bandmate Chris Lowe, on keyboards, concentrated on material from their melancholy, guitar-driven new album, Release.

Back-lit by dozens of spotlights mounted on steel scaffolding around them, it was actually hard at first to see the faces of the veteran British dance duo. But the point seemed to be to get the audience to really concentrate on the new music.

And flanked by two guitarists, a programmer and a magnificent female percussionist, Tennant and Lowe made the most of the warm, full sound in the intimate setting on new songs Home And Dry, I Get Along, London, Birthday Boy, You Choose and the Eminem sexual fantasy song, The Night I Fell In Love. The latter song featured Tennant grabbing his crotch.

The atmosphere was also dramatically altered by the spotlights changing colour -- from white to scarlet to violet -- while the backdrop behind the musicians became a beautiful starry night for the new ballad, Love Is A Catastrophe.

There was the odd uptempo number like the clap-a-long-inducing Where The Streets Have No Name/Can't Take My Eyes Off Of You , New York City Boy and the hilariously named You Only Tell Me You Love Me When You're Drunk. But the heavy-duty, hip-wiggling really didn't get underway until towards the end of the show.

It was You Were Always On My Mind -- and a cool strobe-light effect that briefly turned Massey Hall into a disco -- that finally got people out of their seats and busting some serious dance moves. Followup songs West End Girls and Go West and the encore numbers Being Boring and It's A Sin kept them there.

As for the 47-year-old Tennant, with his closely-cropped, salt-and-pepper hair, boyish face and elegant clothes, he's looking more and more like Peter Gabriel these days. A better comparison, however, might be that if Noel Coward ever fronted a pop band -- he would be Neil Tennant. His sweet-sounding falsetto never failed him and he seemed truly chuffed at the enthusiastic response from the crowd of about 2,500.

"You are fabulous!" Tennant exclaimed towards the end of the evening.

No Neil, you are. And after more than 20 years as a Pet Shop Boy, that's saying something. (More on the Pet Shop Boys)

JAM! Rating: 4.5 out of 5