Night Work has a pulse to it that makes you believe that if you dance as hard as this band wants you to through your life, your love and your problems – your ass will be as firm as the one Robert Maplethorp used in the photo that adorns this album’s cover. While there are still themes of love on the album (Fire with Fire, Skintight), you get the sense the band has abandoned the long-term relationship ideals highlighted in 2006’s Ta-Dah! in favor of returning to the glitter n’ grit that marked their debut (We can talk about relationships but there’s better things to fill your head with). Electric, raw and campy all at the same time, Night Work exists in the world that happens after the sun goes down.
It’s been four years since we last heard from the Scissor Sisters. In 2004, lead singer Jake Shears first introduced us to his falsetto while the Scissor Sisters promised – or threatened? – to take your mama out and show her a good time. The debut also featured their electro-pop take on Pink Floyd’s Comfortably Numb, discussions of queers on piers, the indisputable fact that you can’t see tits on the radio and proved them to be a band that could jump from genre to genre, threatening to spin out of control but always somehow keeping their footing. It was an electric debut, one that brought them large success in the UK where it reached #1 as well as being the best-selling album of that year. By comparison, they were relegated to niche staus here in the States where the album peaked at #102.
Riding on the wave of their success (3.3 million world-wide), the band didn’t waste a lot of time and even tapped Sir Elton John for help on their follow up. Ta-Dah! debuted at #1 in the UK and peaked at #19 here in their homeland. However, while the band once again explored a variety of sounds and grew in strength in terms of composing a song, they relied on making a bigger sound with bigger production and ultimately polished some of the excitement out of the album. Night Work brings them back to finding strength in their spontaneity.
You can tell by the attention to detail, the track sequencing and the fact that the band discarded a whole album worth of material before ultimately going back to the studio to record Night Work, that Scissors Sisters takes themselves seriously. But having fun at the same time has always played an important part in what makes the Scissor Sisters work (for example, the band’s name is inspired by a sex position). The song, Any Which Way finds Shears in a kaledescope of double-entendres, seemingly unable to resist making one more pun: “No talk of commitment/When I receive a shipment/Oh I need express delivery.” The song also features the first appearance of Ana Metronic, the band’s matriarch and master of ceremonies, as she asks you to take her anyway you like it, “in front of the fireplace/In front of your yacht/In front of my parents,” with the caveat that you must smell like cocoa butter and cash.
After offering himself (and the band) up in Any Which Way, Shears quickly turns into a seductive dom on Harder You Get as he uses his lower register to great effect. Jake Shears has a mighty fine falsetto, one that can always put a smile on your face, it’s good to see his lower register can do the same. The shower, literally and figuratively, drips at the end of the song and suddenly the Sisters are off with Running Out, their New Wave-inspired rumination on drugs, fame and the complications of keeping everyone around you, well, around. The song, pulling vocals ques from The Knack’s My Sharona and production elements reminiscent of those found on David Bowie’s Scary Monsters, rides on an 80’s swagger that I can never resist. On the other side of things, the song Skin Tight finds the band’s sentimental side working pretty well. Sometimes sincerity can turn camp into corny, but Skin Tight effectively constructs a song that builds upon itself until it shoots out as that particular brand of Scissor Sisters’ glitter cannon. When it works it works.
If the album has a lull it’s in the back-to-back songs Something Like This and Skin this Cat, where the album’s otherwise-catchy repetition found in the songs don’t take them anywhere new. However, with one exception, there’s not a track on this album longer then 5 minutes, and the album switches, swaggers and moves oh-so-rapidly that it’s unlikely you’ll tune out for too long: again, there’s a reason that ass is on the cover.
Nightlife effectively bookends what was started with Night Work, finding the band as energetic as when they started the late-shift, still firm in their conviction that “our love is taboo … [but] you can find your life in the night life”. The epilogue, then, is found in the closing track Invisible Light. A lot has been made about this track when talking about the album, but it’s one of those tracks that makes you take a moment and say this band can do this and that?!?!
In 2004’s debut album, they closed the album with Return to Oz, a song depicting broken promises of gay fantasia. One riddled with drugs and disease. In 2006, the album ended with Everybody Wants the Same Thing and reflected the movement towards mainstreaming GLBT culture. In 2010, they raise an army to scale the walls of that broken-down Oz in order to have an eternal dance party, hypnotized by, you guessed it, an “invisible light.” The song is a dance floor-ready homage to the gay bar. Not to be outdone by their 2006 partnership with Sir Elton John, in 2010 they got Sir Ian McKellen to do his best Vincent Price-esque Thiller Monologue. This track does more than just ape Thiller, though: in Ian McKellen’s version he’s asking for “sexual gladiators” and “fiercely old party children” to “wake from their slumber” and come back to the those broken promises and build a dance party. One that will go on forever. It’s a moment where the band borrows another popular popular 80’s convention – Fuck art, let’s dance. Camp is fun and these guys nail it.
Favorite Tracks:
• Night Work
• Harder You Get
• Running Out
• Skin Tight
• Invisible Light