My daddy stayed pretty while my momma married into the mob

Continuing my trip back through the 2010 album charts.

11/07/10 : Night Work - Scissor Sisters

Our second visit with Scissor Sisters - I don't hate them and I appreciate there is plenty of skill involved, but I do find they grow a bit tiresome, so my expectations aren't massively high for this,

But...

...it's not bad at all.  And when I say that, I mean it's really quite good.  There's way more variety here than I was expecting.  Some is pure Bee Gees disco, some more 80s disco, some almost LCD Soundsystem-like and there's definitely some Eltonesque sounds in there - and it's all very well put together.  It's also (for me) surprisingly un-camp - I've nothing against a bit of camp. but Scissor Sisters have taken it way over the line in the past.  However, here it's surprisingly understated - OK, not actually understated (what was I thinking?) but a lot less overstated than you'd expect and the variety really helps as well.  Bravo, Scissor Sisters!

We're at #4 in the charts this week on their second week of a fourteen week run, having debuted at #2 - it feels like it deserved a longer run to me.  The rest of the top five were Kylie (a new entry), Eminem, Plan B and Alicia Keys and we have one more new entry in the top ten with Enrique Iglesias at #6 - I think I'm fine without that in my life.

The Wikipedia entry for the album is surprisingly large, but you'd be amazed how little of it is about the album.  Most of it is about the album they recorded before this one, most of which was thrown away, but they did keep their version of Roxy Music's "Do The Strand" which was released as part of the War Child album and it is as good as you'd expect.  There are some interesting names involved in the album - Kylie Minogue, Santigold (a very under-rated artist imho), Ian McKellan, Helen Terry (known mostly for her work with Culture Club) and Stuart Price (who I'd never heard of until very recently when I read about his production work on Kylie's album).

The most interesting section is about the album cover, which is a Robert Mapplethorpe photo (I went to one of his exhibitions once - it was certainly, errr, quite something) and Del Maquis (the bass player) made an interesting observation about it - "the way someone reacts to it will tell you a lot about that person. People could view it with reactionary homophobia, or they could view it as camp, or high art, or something beautiful".  Which I totally agree with, but my reaction was "lordy, those are tight trousers/leggings/whatever they are/actually, what are they?" - make of that what you will.  I did love the fact that they made sure they put it up on billboards in religiously conservative neighbourhoods though...

Interestingly, the critical reception section consists of one generic sentence - they mostly liked it, but I would have liked to hear some more detailed comment.  The album did well commercially, but didn't hit the top anywhere - the best it did was #2 in UK and Greece (which, probably not coincidentally, were the countries where Kylie did best as well).

"Customers also listened to" Sophie Ellis-Bextor, MIKA, Basement Jaxx and Goldfrapp - yup, there's all of that in there in places on this album.  Which, as I might have already mentioned, was a very pleasant surprise!

04/07/10 - Admirable rather than enjoyable
18/07/10 - An enjoyable sympathy listen