Ooh, meanwhile, seems to be bending over backwards in its efforts to annoy you, an aim it achieves in spades.įor all its highlights, however, Ta-Dah is haunted by the thought that the Scissors Sisters can't keep this up much longer. This is presumably coincidental, but that doesn't make it any less disconcerting for the listener of a certain age. Or worse - I Can't Decide's banjo-driven oompah bears a striking resemblance to the theme music from low-rent 70s talent contest New Faces. These occur when the songs aren't strong enough to support the sheer weight of musical satin and tat: you find yourself wondering why you're listening to something that sounds like the rummer bits of Now That's What I Call Music 83. However, for all that good taste is clearly not the point, there are moments when the even the most devoted aficionado of kitsch might feel like drawing a handkerchief over their nose and mouth. It's hard not to be beguiled by Might Tell You Tonight's apparently true tale of Shears abandoning the high life for domestic contentment, or by The Other Side, spooked by a deceased lover's ghost. If the song Paul McCartney bears the influence of its titular hero, it comes not via the Beatles, nor even Wings: instead, it sounds like something Macca might have tried around the time of 1986's Press To Play.Īs with the Scissor Sisters' debut, Ta-Dah is saved from sounding like the disco Darkness by the enviably polished songwriting - the choruses ascend heavenward, the ballads yearn without slipping into mawkishness - and the evident sincerity of the lyrics. Intermission offers let's-do-the-show-right-here Broadway camp that Rufus Wainwright might reject for sounding a little too florid and, well,"gay". The fabulous Kiss You Off opens with choral vocals in the style of more-is-more producer Jim Steinman, then continues in a manner you might describe as inspired by Knock on Wood: not Eddie Floyd's soul original, but Amii Stewart's irreverent disco makeover. Like frontman Jake Shears' wardrobe, Ta-Dah delights in presenting one affront to good taste after another. The prosaic answer may be that the supermarket shoppers who picked up the Scissor Sisters eponymous debut in droves couldn't care less about long-held notions of musical cool.Įither way, its successor understandably declines to fix something that sales figures indicate ain't broke.
You could theorise that the multi-platinum success of the New York quintet's glitzy kitsch represents a reaction to post-Oasis rock's dowdy, blinkered classicism. Quite how we arrived at a point where one of the year's most hotly anticipated albums consists entirely of music influenced by a charity shop record rack is a nice question. Upon hearing both the song, and the news that it currently rests at No 1, you suspect Waters might once more consider the benefits of cutting himself off from the rest of civilisation with a giant wall. Given the company it keeps, the guitar line that echoes the bridge of Abba's SOS seems the denier cri in studied cool. Elsewhere, you find a jolly, pumping piano line that is actually the handiwork of Elton John, but more obviously recalls his less hip 1970s contemporaries - Gilbert O'Sullivan perhaps - as well as a falsetto melody that seems a close relation to Leo Sayer's You Make Me Feel Like Dancin', and, most unsettling of all, a syn-drum tom-tom roll that recalls that deathless classic of the post-punk era, The Lion Sleeps Tonight by Tight Fit.
Among them, Abba stand out by dint of being easily the most credible. It offers a plethora of musical influences in a matter of seconds. It's tempting to wonder what Waters would make of the first bars of I Don't Feel Like Dancin', the current single from the Scissor Sisters, who made their name by releasing a preposterous disco reinterpretation of his earnest, soul-searching ballad Comfortably Numb. "From the first bar I ever heard by Abba," he snapped, clearly mortally offended, "I was an ex-listener." Offering a salutary reminder that, in an age of Guilty Pleasures, some areas of the rock establishment remain immune to the habit of reappraising what was once deemed irrevocably naff, Waters cut the journalist short. R ecently, a bold journalist asked Roger Waters if he had ever heard Abba's swansong The Visitors, an album he felt bore unlikely similarities to Pink Floyd.
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