Night Work
5/5
Surveying the pop vista almost 10 years since the Scissor Sisters first came calling, it’s easy to spot their influence. Some, like Of Montreal, have built on their glam-disco oeuvre, while others just mercilessly cribbed from it (mainly looking at you, Mika).
Though everyone and their dog has had a disco moment in the intervening years, Night Work is strong enough to ensure Scissor Sisters are not simply dwarfed by their legion of imitators. On the plus side, the wedding reception hell of ‘I Don’t Feel Like Dancing’ isn’t revived here. Producer Stuart Price does a great job of rendering Jake Shears’s and Ana Matronic’s innate sleaziness with a wide palette of sounds, even allowing some Teutonic motorik to seep in on the Kraftwerk-aping ‘Skin This Cat’. Others, like the title track, are as tight and perky as the Robert Mapplethorpe-photographed rear that adorns the cover.
The one stain on Night Work is the shamelessly stadium-oriented single ‘Fire with Fire’. Ignore it. It badly misrepresents an album that brims with dancefloor vim and camp vigour and, most importantly, still sounds
like the band we first fell for all those years ago.
