The Scissor Sisters get a rave review for their new album Ta-Dah from the Times of London:
“In Britain we expect a certain amount of camp from our entertainers — and yet it’s hard to imagine that there might have been a British Scissor Sisters, a band who understood the straight-up disco potential in covering Pink Floyd’s Comfortably Numb for their debut single. Being out about your sexuality is one thing, but such is the lingering tribalism left by punk’s year-zero approach, that being out about the unholy triumvirate of 1970s genres — soft-rock, beard-rock and disco — is another thing entirely…If Scissor Sisters have felt any kind of pressure to extend the run of hits spawned by their first album, you wouldn’t know it by listening to this guileless, celebratory record. Might Tell You Tonight is a cry for a home where new love waits for the first time, allied to an industrially adhesive chorus.”
Celebration was hardly part of the process in creating the album, however, according to a cover article by Tom Donaghy in this month’s Out magazine. During the recording of Ta-Dah, Jake Shears slid into a depression which was compounded by the death of the namesake of one of their first album’s hits, Shears’ friend Mary.
Said Shears, who apparently met Mary on a phone chat line when he was 15 : “She looked out for me. I was somehow getting into gay bars, and she would drive an hour to wait in the parking lot until I was ready to go home. She’d struggled with obesity for a long time and didn’t understand why someone she thought was living ‘a fabulous life’ would want to be her friend. I wrote the song to reassure her.”
“Mary” was probably my favorite song off their last album. Never knew the affirming story behind it.
Check out Out‘s Jake Shears cover after the jump…
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New Scissor Sisters Single: “Don’t Feel Like Dancing” [tr]
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