Night Work

If the cover of Night Work did not clue you in, let's just state the obvious right now: This is a very, very gay album. Whereas the first two Scissor Sisters records found a way to translate specifically gay subject matter into big-tent camp that opened up their appeal to anyone with a taste for colorful dance music and 1970s radio pop, their third album isn't quite as inclusive. They are no less tuneful, but their aesthetic and lyrical themes are more firmly rooted in gay culture, to the point that many straight listeners may find themselves feeling like outsiders looking in. Instead of presenting a queer pop sensibility for the masses, they've gone deeper into their subcultural niche.

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There is an overall lack of animating passion to be found on Night Work, the third Scissor Sisters album, some barely tangible quality that would otherwise transform these songs into something inspired rather than something merely competent that is simply missing here. As unfair as it may be to hold the band’s biography against them, the circumstances surrounding the making of Night Work turn out to be especially telling: having spent a year and a half in the studio recording what was to be the follow up to Ta-Dah (2006), the band (whose original drummer Paddy Boom quit during this period, here replaced by the as-goofily-named Randy Real) ended up scrapping entirely the fruits of this labor, grabbing superstar producer Stuart Price (who had previously done some remixes for the band) to help put together what turns out to be exactly the by-no-means disastrous yet largely safe, middling and even exhausted-sounding effort that such a back story would suggest.

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Scissor Sisters' electro-pop defined mainstream music in the Noughties, with every producer, songwriter and pop artist clawing for a bit of their success. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, though possibly not when that imitation is Mika. Even though Scissor Sisters have been consumed, digested and regurgitated by the mainstream, ‘Comfortably Numb’ was still a defining moment in pop.

Full Review | More Reviews from Publication | Top Rated of 2010