The penultimate song Neil Tennant sang during the Pet Shop Boys' dazzlingly staged, entirely fabulous show at the House of Blues in Atlantic City on Sunday was "Being Boring."

The 1990 hit single with the Zelda Fitzgerald-inspired lyric served as both a heart-wrenching tribute to lost youth and those lost to AIDS ("All the people I was kissing, some are here, some are missing") and a matter-of-fact boast from the enduring British synth-pop duo of Tennant and his silent computer and keyboard-playing partner Chris Lowe.

As the song goes, "I would never find myself feeling bored, because we were never being boring." Indeed, there was never a dull moment throughout the Pets' ingeniously theatrical 90-minute set, during which they were accompanied by four dancers usually wearing cubes on their heads, in sync with the Piet Mondrian-meets-Rubik's Cube-while-climbing-Pink-Floyd's-The-Wall stage design.

And that's to say nothing of the video backdrops that accompanied the set, which mixed a smattering of the band's 2009 return-to-form album Yes with back-catalog rarities such as "Two Divided By Zero" and erudite and aerobic disco hits "West End Girls" and "Left to My Own Devices."

The big screen might be showing giant pixelated, Chuck Close-style portraits of Tennant and Lowe one moment; at another, their faces were inside yellow Pac Man characters, gobbling up dollar signs and hearts in "Love, Etc.," as Tennant dryly sang that to achieve bliss in these troubled times, one doesn't "have to be beautiful, but it helps."

And one montage during the grandly melancholy cover of Willie Nelson's "Always on My Mind" showed black-and-white footage of London during the Blitz, interspersed with images of roller coasters and a "Pleasure Palace" from the English seaside resort of Blackpool. By coincidence, it was perfectly apropos for the group's debut performance along the Boardwalk in Atlantic City.

OK, enough about how the show looked. How did it sound? Pretty great. Other than Lowe, there were no musicians on stage, though there was one number when the multicolored cube-headed dancers - two of whom turned out to be Gwen Stefani-lookalike identical twins, Polly and Sophie Duniam - pretended to play trumpets.

But while it's always been a challenge to figure out what the mostly immobile Lowe is doing to trigger the cascading synths and momentum-gathering beats at a Pet Shop Boys show, the elegant simplicity of two-decade-old hits such as "Suburbia" sounds perfectly contemporary at the end of the '00s as all forms of '80s electro-pop have come back in fashion.

Tennant is more of a talker than a singer, but he delivers his own lyrics - which typically examine the inherently transactional relationship between love and money with more acuity than anybody in the history of pop - with a droll distance that allows room for irony and real feeling. And along with the originals, the Pets remain master of the expertly chosen cover.

On Sunday, they not only delivered winningly reworked versions of well-known takes on "Always on My Mind" and the Village People's "Go West," but also revealed a soaring mash-up of their own "Domino Dancing" with Coldplay's "Viva La Vida," as Tennant reminisced about the days "when I ruled the world" while dressed as Richard III wearing a golden crown.

He needn't have used the past tense: As their House of Blues performance demonstrated, 25 years after they got going, the Pet Shop Boys still rule.

Contact music critic Dan DeLuca at 215-854-5628 or ddeluca@phillynews.com. Read his blog, "In the Mix," at www.philly.com/philly/ blogs/inthemix.