You don’t need me to tell you what the title Night Work barely codes here – it’s sex, sex, sex. Only the Scissor Sisters would have the balls to use a man tugging at his posterior as their album cover, and more importantly they’re the only mainstream act that could pull such a move off. Still, one senses that this zoom onto such a sexualised image reflects the lyrical subject that might put off the public at large – fact is, this is a defiantly, shamelessly gay album, and not in the florid, camp way that the Scissor Sisters at least projected, even if they were never essentially engaging that in their music. Night Work is the kind of uncompromising piece of work that comes from an act truly secure in their own skin, one moving forward with artistry rather than audience in mind; if Ta-Dah! had a problem it was that it trod too carefully, in the process missing what made their self-titled debut so searingly successful in its joyful camp exuberance.
Which is not to say that Night Work has any shortage of melody or lyrical invention; on the contrary, it feels tighter and slicker than their debut, packed with a wide variety of moods and sounds while truly feeling like a coherent vision, an album with a visible through-line. It seems to encompass a story of a kind of gay ‘experience’ – Jake Shears would never pretend to be able to understand them all – without losing sight of its existence as music, an entertainment. Outrageous falsettos, wonderfully bizarre interjections from Ana Matronic, brazenly sexual lyrics – producer Stuart Price, firing on all cylinders as if these particularities spark precisely on his nerve endings, is instrumental in containing these excesses. In a sense, he does the same job here as he did for Kylie Minogue, but what felt flattening there feels as though it enhances this album – tracks as disparate as the rubbery, grinding ‘Whole New Way’ and the soaring lead single ‘Fire With Fire’ (where Shears’ vocals lose the falsetto and the song, with its piano and strings in place of the usual guitar and synths, recalls Elton John’s highest points) sit happily alongside each other, unusual friends but joined through shared oddity. Price isn’t dampening a vision; he’s lifting it, rubbing the songs up against each other and finding that unusual sparks are the most interesting kind. As the final few tracks segue thrillingly into each other, this becomes darkly, orgasmically clear.
For Night Work really does reach its peak at its end – which is not to devalue songs like ‘Any Which Way’, with its jumpy, sing-along chorus and a whispering Kylie on backing vocals, or the interminably circling beat of ‘Running Out’, or the crunchy, robotic ‘Something Like This’, or, well you see where I’m going with this. But the album really starts to take flight in the underworld it inhabits as ‘Skin Tight’ darkens and leads into the circling harpsichord beat of ‘Sex and Violence’, juddering forward into the communal jive of ‘Night Life’ and finally, deliriously, into the expansive, epic ‘Invisible Light’, where reverbing synths, crowing birds, hand drums, a moaning choir and the “fiercely old party child” Ian McKellan all make for what can only be described as the album’s parts colliding into one another and exploding. For while the album’s cover and what it reflects of the album may distance some, ‘Invisible Light’ proves what Night Work really means for the Scissor Sisters – it’s a communal, celebratory, inclusive piece of work, one that invites you into the darkness, where you might just find the invisible light.
****½
David Upton
