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. It's also suggested that he had to fight against religious morals, probably a reference to those people ashamed of being gay amidst judgemental bigotsĪfter that, still completely drunk, he drives his car to a certain selected spotR 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. While he ponders on how things really are in life "Don't let those precious moments fool youĪt nightfall, he begins to hallucinate, with angels waiting for his decision Scenery is astounding, but he tries to stay firm, becasue it's all a distraccion. He ( or she) is starring his last sunset, drinking a lot just to get enough courage to do it. I think this is a song about someone who is going to commit suicide. Now there's never gonna' be an intermission With somebody giving you a piece of advice You want to tell someone the way that you feel That is when you hear the song falling from the sky When you're standing on the side of a hillĭon't let those precious moments fool youĪnd you're going on your fifteenth bender
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