Magic Hour, the latest from Scissor Sisters, is no Night Work but that's just fine. The NYC-based dance-pop group reached the culmination of condensing forty years of club-going culture into one band’s discography on their last full-length. The undertaking was of such deadly seriousness to mastermind Jake Shears that they had scrapped the initial attempt at a third LP and allowed four years to go by since they had reached well beyond the gaze of private eyes with “I Don’t Feel Like Dancing." The results were awe inspiring, outdoing even their first two highly impressive albums in a fully realized hybrid of Gibb-slick disco mastery and a finger-flipping fearlessness and determination unseen in a band since the early days of the Dwarves (or those of Nashville Pussy at the least). These guys were here to crash and restart the party and if you didn’t care to stick around, your only recourse was to not let the champagne cork hit you in the ass on the way out.
Magic Hour, instead, is Scissor Sisters’ Diamonds and Pearls, plain and simple. Much like Prince’s 1991 line in the sand, the band’s latest album calls to mind a lesson learned from Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes (or from David Brent, depending on your frame of reference), if you aren’t down with these guys by this point, then fuck all y’all. A similar grab bag of genre exercises and ill-inspired rap attempts holding up a handful of truly great moments (like opener “Baby Come Home," featuring the awesome lyric “it’s half past quarter to three," and a worthy successor to Night Work highlight “Sex and Violence” in “Self Control”), the parallel with His Purple Majesty’s follow up to both the Batman and Graffiti Bridge soundtracks extends to the fact that both albums serve as a turning point for the relationship between the musicians and the record buying public (or whatever the hell passes for it in the current market). Even some of the tracks have very clear echoes, “Keep Your Shoes” as sinisterly randy as “Gett Off”, and “Year of Living Dangerously” a similarly melancholy mission statement as “Money Don’t Matter 2 Night”.
Whether the album is among the band’s best work is fairly irrelevant, what they’re aiming for here is the demographic they’ve been cultivating since their debut. Call it a bear market. Hell, call it a twink market too. But if you find yourself grinning uncomfortably whenever “Love Shack” plays at a Bar Mitzvah, perhaps it might be best to sit this one out. This is for the listener secure enough in their sexuality to indulge Shears and co. every in-joke and out joke as well. I’m still unclear as to what exactly the titular phrase in “Let’s Have a Kiki” means, but I’m assuming (probably wrongly) it has something to do with Kiki Dee, the erstwhile duet partner of the band’s most high profile champion, Sir Reginald Dwight. The spoken intro to that track, however, finds fiery furnace Ana Matronic, a “fag-hag” Neko Case if you will, re-purposing the acronym MTA to stand for “motherfuckers touching my ass” and making me laugh out loud on first listen. If you can get into that much, the album is a great deal of fun, as even the seemingly insipid closer “Fuck Yeah” pulls the album’s best chorus out of the bag and drops off the listener right outside the after-party. If none of the tracks on Magic Hour are quite as inspired as past glories like “Tits on the Radio” or “Invisible Light," well, maybe these guys just came to shake hell under the strobe light. I mean, what did you show up for?
Artist:
www.scissorsisters.com/
www.myspace.com/scissorsisters
www.facebook.com/scissorsisters
www.twitter.com/#!/scissorsisters
Album:
Magic Hour is out now. Buy it here on Amazon .
