Night Work
Scissor Sisters
Downtown Records
WHEN DID Camille Paglia become so old-fashioned? Last summer, the famed feminist and Sexual Personae author decried the death of rock music in a painfully unhip piece published in The New York Times (6/25/10): “Rock music, once sexually pioneering, is in the dumps,” she lamented, since “step by step, rock lost its visceral rawness and seductive sensuality.”
Obviously, Paglia has never partaken of the Scissor Sisters, the New York glam rockers heralded by Rolling Stone (6/29/10) as “a welcome new queer voice in rock.” Night Work is the group’s third release since its self-titled debut sold 320,000 copies in the U.S., only to sell 2.7 million more in Britain, where it swept the Brit Awards and became the best selling album of 2004. Its success was due largely to the worldwide hit “Take Your Mama,” a playful pledge to turn the most sacred figure of all into a hedonist overnight. “We’ll get her jacked up on some cheap champagne,” sang front-man (and principal songwriter) Jake Shears, “We’ll let the good times all roll out.” Night Work is another good time, a rollicking return to the Sisters’ signature sound, and with tracks like “Skin Tight,” “Sex and Violence,” and “Skin this Cat,” it’s also their seediest and most seductive work to date. Given the Sisters’ initial success, there was probably no avoiding the sophomore slump to which their next album, 2006’s Ta-Dah, succumbed, despite a guest appearance by Sir Elton John on “I Don’t Feel Like Dancin’” and the saloon-bar swing of “She’s My Man.” (A hit on the European charts, Ta-Dah sold a mere 181,000 copies domestically.) The 31-year old Shears (born Jason Sellards) has likened the band’s earlier albums to “buffets of a lot of different sounds,” but proudly boasts that Night Work is “the first record that doesn’t sound like anything other than ourselves.” As he told Out magazine (7/2010): “You can make out and have sex to the whole album.” Those earlier influences (the B-52’s, the Bee Gees, Blondie, and Bowie) were always easy to detect, sometimes distractingly so, but their 2004 cover of Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb” turned that druggy drift of a song (always wafting from college dorm rooms) into something all their own. Because of Shears’ astounding vocal range, “Comfortably Numb” became an exuberant dance number sung, in falsetto, by what sounds like a castrato carting a helium tank. Other tracks like “Filthy/Gorgeous” and “Tits on the Radio” kept the party going. Night Work only reinforces the fact that the sleazy nocturne is what Scissor Sisters do best, which explains why their sound makes little to no sense before nine p.m. “I sleep all day but I break my back in the moonlight,” Shears sings on the album’s title track, while on “Night Life” he craves the “pill you’re tasting” and the “cash you’re making.” The band managed to recruit another British knight for a cameo, this time Sir Ian McKellen, who utters something about a “sparkling theatre of excess,” “painted whores,” and “sexual gladiators” on the ominous album closer, “Invisible Light.” The gothic tone of McKellen’s voice is an unmistakable echo of Vincent Price’s voice-over in Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” and, performing “Invisible Light” live, the Sisters went out with a bang, literally, by showering their fans with confetti before waving goodnight. Even bolder, Shears insisted on using a photo by Robert Mapplethorpe of a man’s rock-hard buttocks for the album cover, despite the disapproval of his label, his management, and even his fellow Sisters. Those buttocks belonged to ballet dancer Peter Reed, who died of aids in 1994, and Shears felt the image perfectly symbolized the album’s central motif: erotic vigor in the face of death. Call it a stiff upper zip. Call it cheeky fun. Whatever you call it, Night Work is sheer magic.
Shears, who once worked as a go-go dancer and still has the moves to prove it, is buoyed by equally outlandish and pseudonymous bandmates: vocalist Ana Matronic (once the host of a Manhattan drag show where Shears got his start), guitarist Babydaddy, bassist Del Marquis, and drummer Randy Real. Performing at the Ogden in Denver last fall, Shears gyrated around in an assless leotard while Ms. Matronic, the doyenne of disco, stood squarely downstage with the vacant stare of a runway model. In the spoken-word portion of their new single, “Any Which Way,” she intones: “Take me any way you like it, in front of the fireplace, in front of your yacht, in front of my parents, I don’t give a damn, baby, just take me!” There is, after all, the unavoidable matter of the pair’s good looks. Even music critic Sasha Frere-Jones of The New Yorker (8/16/2010) appeared clearly smitten when he described Shears and Matronic as the “Platonic ideals of attractive people, burlesque versions of Sean Connery and Ann-Margret.” James Bond, however, could not have been further from my mind when Shears, bathed in a devilish red light during a performance of “Harder You Get,” pulsed his pelvis at the audience and sang: “I know the reaper/ on a first name basis/ It ain’t Steven/ It isn’t Adam/ I got some apples if you want ’em/ you can grab ’em.”
