Scissor Sisters
Night Work
Downtown, June 2010
Ta-Dah, the Scissor Sisters’ second album, was the easy way out. Following the success of their self-titled debut and its inventive, irreverent pastiche of various and sundry ’70s pop and rock sounds–from mid-period Roxy Music luxe balladry to Elton John boogie to its masterstroke, a disco-fied Frankie Goes to Hollywood and Bee Gees-referencing cover of Pink Floyd’s sacrosanct “Comfortably Numb”–the group…churned out another album based on various and sundry ’70s pop and rock sounds. Only this time, gone was much of the inventiveness and irreverence. While the previous outing danced merrily along that fine line between subversion and celebration that powered the first four or five Roxy records, Ta-Dah was pretty much straightforward Eltonisms all the way. The attempts to juxtapose the happy and sad sides of the bacchanalian life they were chronicling felt obvious and forced: I don’t care if they got a huge smash out of it in England, doing a song about not wanting to dance, calling it “I Don’t Feel Like Dancing,” and basing it on an extremely danceable riff on Leo Sayer’s “You Make Me Feel Like Dancin'” is cheap-seat stuff. By album’s end, the would-be anthem “Everybody Wants the Same Thing,” the lyrics felt like a Rent outtake. There was still stuff to enjoy–the bass strut and huge middle-eight of “Paul McCartney” and the touching and tender love confession of “Might Tell You Tonight” taking top honors–but in the main this was dictionary-definition diminishing returns.
So that’s Ta-Dah. Here, in the words of frontman Jake Shears, is Night Work:
Well, I had a moment. I was at a sex party in Mannheim, I was on the dancefloor. It was six o’clock in the morning. I was wearing a little rubber wrestling singlet. I was having a great time. There was a cloud in the room, this cloud of man sweat, cigarettes, spilled booze, shit because people were getting fisted, and poppers. And piss! It was disgusting… The most vile place I’ve ever been. And I was dancing, and the DJs put on ‘Walk The Night’ by the Skatt Brothers. It’s one of my favourites. It was one of those revelatory moments for me when I realised what I wanted the album to sound like and how I wanted it to make me feel. Am I rambling? But that was the defining moment. My vision! My vision happened very clearly in that moment.
Sold! With that core concept in mind, Night Work is the sound of a reinvigorated band with balls to spare. Literally, at that: This is the sort of record I haven’t heard in a long, long time in that almost every song is a sort of double entendre where maybe it’s maybe not really about fucking but probably yeah, it probably is. There’s a song called “Harder You Get” that includes the lyric “Don’t point that thing at me unless you plan to shoot.” There’s a song called “Skin This Cat,” sung by Ana Matronic about the million ways she would like a gentleman friend to do so, in a tone that suggests she’s not talking about her Tonkinese. There’s a song called “Whole New Way” about finding a whole new way to love you that involves not being able to see your eyes and sneaking up from behind–and it bleeps and squelches sassily along like “Monkey” by George Michael to boot. I’d say “Do I need to draw you a picture here?”, but thanks to the album cover, it’s extra unnecessary.
To me, though, the ’80s-style wink-wink nudge-nudge smut is a lot of fun, but where the album really clicks is on the level of urgency. Its opening, title track barrels out of the gate with pulsing strings, strutting electric guitar, a relentless bam-bam-bam-bam beat and chirping high-pitched vocals that practically kick your face in with their manic intensity by the time the chorus comes around: “NIGHT! WORK! GOTTA DO THE NIGHT WORK! WEEKDAY NINE TO FIVE SHIFT IS OVER!” “Harder You Get” and “Running Out” provide a similar one-two punch pummeling later in the album, the former with a head-banging riff/chanted chorus combo and the latter with a breathless, jagged pace reminiscent of Devo at their tightest. There’s an overall willingness to go for it here that was sorely lacking on their last album, whether that means recruiting Sir Ian McKellen for a Vincent Price-style spoken-word monologue about “sexual gladiators” or bucking the wishes of both the label and the majority of the band itself to put a photo of a dude’s ass on the album cover.
Which leads to an important note: Both of the men involved in that picture–photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and dancer Peter Reed–died of AIDS. The menace lurking beneath the surface of Night Work is far less facile than, say, putting the words “we were born to die” on top of a jaunty Tin Pan Alley tune in Ta-Dah‘s “Intermission”–it’s more a subtle but repeated admonition that the bad comes with the good. “Remember this is what you asked for,” Shears warns on “Night Work”; “Stop crying like a child / You got what you want,” he says, repeating the sentiment, in “Harder You Get”; there’s a song called “Sex and Violence” that makes pretty much the same case Jane’s Addiction made on “Ted, Just Admit It…”. But the difference is that Shears and company ultimately come down on the side that it’s all worth it. The album ends with a quartet of very straightforward synth-heavy dance tunes, all four of which are tributes to love and a high-life so intense as to be transformative. You need a little danger to get there, and that’s reflected on Night Work from top to…well, you know.