REVIEW: Scissor Sisters "Scissor Sisters"

Rating: 2

This sounds like Elton John telling Perry Ferrell and Dave Navaro a story about how he once sang a duet with Laura Brannigan during a concert in San Diego.  It was a David Bowie song during the second encore.  Navaro keeps handing neatly folded drawings of himself in leopard-print silk pajamas back to George Clinton who is nodding off in the chair behind him humming "Flashlight" to himself to drown out the sound of Sir Elton's voice.  Urban-hippy-glam-dance.

I don't know much about Elton John's expansive repetoir and I am confident in saying that this doesn't make me a bad person.  I'm guessing, however, that at some point he recorded a song, maybe an entire album, that sounded a little like funk.  Maybe there was a walking bassline, maybe some punchy horns, surely a wahwah guitar and lots and lots of glittery piano.  If such an album exists then I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that it is playing at the Scissor Sisters' house right now, and has been since they found it in someone's garbage 10 years ago.  Neighbors hear it repeating so they peak in the windows but all they can see are assorted arms and legs poking out from a giant pile of feather boas beneath a disco ball.

Ridiculous?  Absolutely, and worse... it is sooooooo boring.  This is pseudo-sexualized whitey funk dance music from the 80s redressed in 21st century glam and digital effects.  No track has the momentum, punch or even tempo to be a real booty-shaker - or the genuine freakness to qualify as subversive even when considering the naughtiest potential of "Take Your Mama Out."  The best thing about this album is that it puts to rest the tired idea that seeming gay is enough to make you cool.

(In the spirit of full disclosure I should acknowledge that I spent a very long and awkward evening at an Elton John concert in 1992 with a then newly ex-girlfriend for whom I bought the tickets prior to and without any reasonable way of anticipating the breakup.)