Caroline Sullivan 

Scissor Sisters: Night Work

Big dance tunes, sex in all its varieties – it's business as usual for Scissor Sisters on album No 3, says Caroline Sullivan
  
  


"Now we're free to be No 1," sings Jake Shears on Fire With Fire, which demands the response: "Well, we'll see about that". The Scissor Sisters scrapped an album's worth of material before Shears decamped to Berlin for inspiration and Madonna-associate Stuart Price was brought in to co-produce. The result imagines where 80s dance music would have gone if Aids had never existed; apparently, it would have stayed where it was, with glittering synth-pop and a ravenous approach to sex as the fulcrum. The album is a dizzying, infectious experience in which throbbing, Moroder-influenced beats never slacken and Shears rarely misses a chance to leer at that hunk across the dancefloor. On Invisible Light, guest Ian McKellen recites a menu of delights, from "painted whores" to "sexual gladiators", and only once, on Running Out, is there a suggestion that hedonism may not nourish the soul. By the end, you feel similarly numbed by the relentless euphoria.

 

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