Don Ignacio's Music Reviews

Scissor Sisters 2004 ★★★★

Laura • Take Your Mama • Comfortably Numb • Mary • Lovers in the Backseat • Tits on the Radio • Filthy/Gorgeous • Music Is the Victim • Better Luck • It Can't Come Quickly Enough • Return to Oz

Post-disco in the most shamelessly enjoyable sense. Scissor Sisters aren’t recreating the 1970s as they were. They’re recreating them as remembered through old videos, club lights, disco records, glam poses, Elton John choruses, and Bee Gees falsetto. Memories reassembled brighter and larger than life. The result: an album that’s bigger, hornier, and a lot gayer than mainstream pop could ever dream of being. “Laura” opens the album with a piano figure that reminds me a little of Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5” but quickly turns into a pounding glam-pop song. The obvious singalong, “Take Your Mama,” is catchy as hell—the sort of thing Elton John himself might have ridden straight onto the charts in 1974. Then comes the album’s oddball detour: “Comfortably Numb,” Pink Floyd’s classic progressive-rock power ballad reborn under a disco beat and Bee Gees falsetto. It’s about as surprisingly good as it is blasphemous. “Filthy/Gorgeous” must be something like the band’s mission statement. It’s big and sweaty. Borrows the groove from Rose Royce’s “Car Wash” and aims itself at listeners who want to be loud, sexual, and entirely unconcerned with what proper society thinks about them. “Return to Oz” brings back the Elton shadow. It’s like a lost track from Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. And its melody is even almost strong enough to pass as one of Elton’s own. Not a flawless album. The back half has a few weaker stretches, and sometimes the lack of originality becomes a distraction. But when this album is on, it’s really on: catchy, cluttered, theatrical, and fired from a confetti cannon directly into a nightclub mirror.

Ta-Dah 2006 ★★★

I Don't Feel Like Dancin' • She's My Man • I Can't Decide • Lights • Land of a Thousand Words • Intermission • Kiss You Off • Ooh • Paul McCartney • The Other Side • Might Tell You Tonight • Everybody Wants the Same Thing • Transistor

Just like the debut: big, campy, and tuneful, with a decent variety. Also like last time, Scissor Sisters are still raiding the 1970s, but the rummaging feels more obvious now. Too many songs sound less like affectionate period pieces than elaborate disguises for records you already know. Especially “She’s My Man”—dangerously close to being the same song as Elton John’s “I’m Still Standing,” except with a few less elegant turns. Still, the song has too much energy for me to stay annoyed with it. And you also get the sense that Sir Elton gave his stamp of approval anyhow, since he collaborated on “I Don’t Feel Like Dancin’,” the easy highlight of the album. It has big piano, falsetto vocals, and an enormous disco bounce. One of those songs so danceable that even people with no rhythm should be able to throw their arms in the air and tap along. “I Can’t Decide” is a vaudeville throwback. Or maybe a throwback to 1970s vaudeville throwbacks—so many layers removed from the source that you lose track of which side of the mirror you’re on. More decent stuff: “Lights” stomps around with a big, swinging brass section, while “Land of a Thousand Words” goes full cosmic ballad. “Paul McCartney” is a strange tribute, given that it’s basically a fast disco track, though I can hear a little of that stiff, repetitive “Coming Up” groove hiding in there. “Ooh” is a bouncy disco song, but it’s missing a truly memorable hook. “Transistor” closes the album and sounds like they used “Red Sails” from Lodger-era Bowie as a starting point. Not a terrible influence, but when they’re that close to mimicking the actual song instead of just catching its essence, it loses some of its fun. Still a big, entertaining album. If their debut was what got the party started with an explosion, this is that same party three hours later. Lost a little of its luster, but showing no signs of slowing down.

Night Work 2010 ★★★½

Night Work • Whole New Way • Fire with Fire • Any Which Way • Harder You Get • Running Out • Something Like This • Skin This Cat • Skin Tight • Sex and Violence • Night Life • Invisible Light

The old influences are still here. Scissor Sisters would not be Scissor Sisters if they weren’t going to make another 1970s throwback album. But this time it’s less feather boa around the piano and more Giorgio Moroder thumping about after midnight in a sweaty disco nightclub. The drawback is the album isn’t terribly diverse. But the album is such fun—and its beats so tight you can set your watch by them—that it hardly even matters. The first two songs set the mood. If you like those and their billowing, unapologetically campy Europop flavors, you’re golden with everything else here. “Fire with Fire,” the third song, starts out like it’s going to break the mold somewhat—an Elton John-esque power ballad. But a minute in, it can’t resist slipping in a Euro-dance pulse, as if the song got bored standing still. “Any Which Way” gets so close to classic disco that it gets its fingers burned. It comes with Bee Gees-style falsetto that they themselves might have gotten some mileage out of back in the day—as long as they were comfortable sounding even gayer than they already did. “Harder You Get” brings in a surprisingly macho riff, the sort of thing that could have worked in a hair-metal setting if the band wasn’t more interested in immediately dragging it under the mirror ball and dousing it in body glitter. “Skin This Cat” is colder and more robotic, keeping the album closer to dance-floor machinery than cabaret flamboyance. If we’re tracking their pop-culture influences, that’s where they start crossing the threshold into the very early 1980s. Chalk this up as another Scissor Sisters album that works because it isn’t trying too hard to prove anything. It just locks into a sound and rides it. Thick beats. Flashy hooks. Polished sleaze. A loud, sweaty disco-rock album that does what it’s supposed to do. Not deep or especially nourishing, though. I can’t say I remember much about it after it’s done playing. Other than that I enjoyed playing it at full volume while driving down the highway.

Magic Hour 2012 ★★½

Baby Come Home • Keep Your Shoes On • Inevitable • Only the Horses • Year of Living Dangerously • Let's Have a Kiki • Shady Love • San Luis Obispo • Self Control • Best in Me • The Secret Life of Letters • Somewhere • Ms. Matronic's Magic Message

Nothing especially wrong with this. Other than the small matter of my not liking it that much. Magic Hour is a pretty large departure for Scissor Sisters, though mostly in the sense that it sounds like they wanted to make a contemporary pop album instead of a fourth retro-disco party in a row. Fair enough, I suppose. But this is also the first time it sounds like they’re not throwing the bash. More like handing out room-temperature catering apps. The songwriting is competent enough, and the production is perfectly slick. I come away from it reasonably entertained, but entirely unmoved. Where’s the stuff I want to blast out of the speakers? “Let’s Have a Kiki” seems like it should be that song. It has a novelty flavor and a party atmosphere, a spoken-word club chant with some personality. “Shady Love” follows with a hip-hop-flavored dance groove and a tribal-ish rhythm. Not infectious exactly, but fun enough while it’s making noise. “San Luis Obispo” brings in a Latin shuffle—one of the album highlights, for sure. “Somewhere” has a light groove and a melody that sticks around for a while. Serviceable, assuming nobody’s depending on it to save the night. Decent pieces turn up here and there, but the album never quite becomes the big, loud thing their previous albums could stumble into without much fuss. I don’t fault Scissor Sisters for expanding their horizons. But Magic Hour goes a lot of places and somehow feels smaller for it. It’s not bad, but it’s also their least album by a fairly long shot.

It’s 10PM… Do You Know Where Your Sisters Are? (Live from O2 in London) 2026 ★★★½

Live Album

Laura (Intro) • Laura • Better Luck • She's My Man • Tits on the Radio • I Can't Decide • Lovers in the Backseat • Running Out • Take Your Mama • Paul McCartney • Fire with Fire • Mary • It Can't Come Quickly Enough • Sex and Violence • Any Which Way • Comfortably Numb • Invisible Light • Let's Have a Kiki • I Don't Feel Like Dancin' • Return to Oz • Filthy Gorgeous • Music Is the Victim

Top points for the title. It’s a jokey jab at Scissor Sisters disappearing for more than a decade, and also a play on that funny old TV PSA where celebrities had to remind Boomer parents to keep track of their children after dark. Here are Scissor Sisters making their triumphant comeback in London. They’re an American band, but the UK always seemed to understand them best. The crowd sounds ecstatic, but you can also hear the size of the stadium. The sound quality is decent, though there’s some big-arena distance around the edges. On the plus side, at nearly two hours, nobody can accuse them of skimping. They still have enough natural showbiz voltage to carry a set this long, too. Even some of the weaker later-period material works better with a live crowd pushing back at it. “Let’s Have a Kiki,” for instance, benefits from being crowd business instead of just sitting there as a song. Mostly, this seems like it was a fun show, which is by far the strongest case for sitting down and listening to it. The band sounds sharp, and the rock-and-roll side gets beefed up nicely. “Comfortably Numb” has some excellent electric guitar soloing around that heavy disco rhythm. Jake Shears, falsetto and boisterous tenor still in good working order, drips camp off this thing like butter off a saturated corn on the cob. The big shiny weapons are still the ones you’d expect: “Take Your Mama” and “I Don’t Feel Like Dancin’.” Those will probably always be my top two Scissor Sisters songs. I wouldn’t pretend most of these improve on the polished-to-a-shine studio versions. But they do bring a little extra live-album charge, and they’re good for closing your eyes and pretending you’re there.