Scissor Sisters: Dirty Fun All the Way Through

The NYT review of their new album "Night Work" and how the US might be ready for their talent, energy and weirdness after the likes of Lady Gaga and Adam Lambert.  Album to be released next Tuesday.

I find it strange that radio in this country isn't afraid to play Gaga or Lambert, but shy away from Scissor Sisters and Pet Shop Boys.  Couldn't have anything to do with their being openly gay acts, could it?  Nah! Silly me.

From the Times:

“Night Work,” due Tuesday from Downtown Records, is a return to Scissor Sisters’ dingier clubland roots, before the band became a chart topper in Europe and a cult favorite in the United States. The album is driven by dance-floor bass rhythms, a thematic through line and what Mr. Shears — born Jason Sellards — called “more brooding and upright and sinister and creepy” songs. It’s still fun, but it’s dirtier fun.
“It’s a nighttime album,” said Babydaddy, né Scott Hoffman, in a green room after the rehearsal. “We wanted to return to that feeling, what we used to do, which was perform at 2 a.m. at Luxx,” a defunct club in Williamsburg that was part of the (equally defunct) electroclash scene. It was from there that the Sisters developed their aesthetic and identity as gay-centric downtown New York performers. They’ve hardly compromised since.
But for what began as a niche act, they’ve always had a broad sound. Now, nearly a decade into the band’s career, Downtown, its new label, is hoping that “Night Work” will be an opportunity for Scissor Sisters to establish themselves for an American audience that so far has viewed them more as a novelty than a stadium filler. In a post-Lady Gaga, post-Adam Lambert era, when dance pop laced with titillation has invaded the global mainstream, “maybe the tide has shifted,” said Keith Caulfield, a senior chart manager and analyst at Billboard. But he emphasized the “maybe.”
Josh Deutsch, the chairman and chief executive of Downtown Records, said the aim was to create the kind of multiplatinum success in the United States that the band has had abroad, though he acknowledged, “That’s a very ambitious goal.” 

The piece is a bit long, but interesting, and revealing.  Read it HERE.

More later.
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