Therefore, the major problem with this album was not whether a song would make the top 100, but which one.
Scissor Sisters is mostly synthpop and neo-disco that's so jaunty and fun it makes you want to wonder if there's a limit to how jaunty a song can be. Like you can put so much sugar in a solution that it becomes supersaturated, and the whole thing reverts back to a crystalized form under certain conditions (I think--it's been a long time since I took chemistry). That's the level of jauntiness in Scissor Sisters' music.
If you want to know the true nature of Scissor Sisters, get a look at this live performance of "Take Your Mama" at the Brit Awards in 2005, in which frontman Jake Shears wears leather pants, suspenders and a feather tail, and leaps around the stage in front of a scene that can only be described as the fusion of Party Monster and Sesame Street, and includes a singing house and a dummer named Paddy Boom.
Scissor Sisters is mostly synthpop and neo-disco that's so jaunty and fun it makes you want to wonder if there's a limit to how jaunty a song can be. Like you can put so much sugar in a solution that it becomes supersaturated, and the whole thing reverts back to a crystalized form under certain conditions (I think--it's been a long time since I took chemistry). That's the level of jauntiness in Scissor Sisters' music.
If you want to know the true nature of Scissor Sisters, get a look at this live performance of "Take Your Mama" at the Brit Awards in 2005, in which frontman Jake Shears wears leather pants, suspenders and a feather tail, and leaps around the stage in front of a scene that can only be described as the fusion of Party Monster and Sesame Street, and includes a singing house and a dummer named Paddy Boom.
"Take Your Mama" is a great song, as is "Lovers in the Backseat," and the jauntiness of those songs only reinforces the deranged beauty of the second half of "Return to Oz," but the money shot on this album is "Laura," an all-time great album opener.
"Laura" eases you into the party drug-infused insanity that is to come. It dips your toes into the characteristic Shears/Ana Matronic parallel vocals and guitar solos that get whammy bar'd to death and the weird, childish organ countermelodies. But most of all, this song convinced me for years that you can make an absolute banger by pounding one finger on the piano at a steady eighth-note rhythm.
There's just not enough jaunty in our music anymore. And nobody did jaunty like early Scissor Sisters.
