Jake Shears has all the time been an artist who straddles each the mainstream and the margins and ‘Final Man Dancing’ – the Scissor Sister’s second solo album for the reason that band went on indefinite hiatus in 2012 – represents his most cohesive try to merge these two identities. Impressed by the liberating home events he hosted at his New Orleans abode, the sequencing unfolds like a DJ set, with the start-of-the-night pure pop hits steadily giving solution to the deeper home and tech-inspired cuts primed for the wee hours.
The primary half opens in territory that wouldn’t frighten the BBC Radio 2 playlists, with the Stylish-style disco of ‘Too A lot Music’ and the glam strut of ‘Do The Tv’, earlier than Kylie Minogue friends on early standout, the shimmering and sensual ‘Voices’. Over an ethereal synth wash, its chokehold-chorus sees Minogue appearing as a siren, whispering to Shears in his sleep, spurring him into motion, permitting her to flex her most beautiful falsetto since her Scissor Sisters-penned hit ‘I Consider In You’.
That’s adopted by ‘I Used to Be Love’ – which by the way developed out of a demo submitted for Minogue’s ‘Disco‘ album – a romp that boats a bells-on, tops-off riff harking back to the Shapeshifters’ ‘Lola’s Theme’. On the OTT ‘Actually Large Deal’, Shears delivers tongue-in-cheek strains (‘Right here I’m, stand again/Give your mother a coronary heart assault’) amid a tacky melody over a clubby observe; it comes on like a hen occasion strawpedoing a bottle of wine and by chance stumbling into Berghain.
The album’s second act, recoded predominantly with Boys Noize, sees the temperature shift and is the purest distillation of Shears’ love of dancefloor hedonism since Scissor Sisters’ 2010 cult traditional ‘Evening Work’. It’s a change heralded by the largely-instrumental electroclash of ‘8 Ball’, the house-diva histrionics of ‘Satan Got here Down the Dancefloor’ and the Sylvester-nodding ‘Mess of Me’. The throbbing ‘Doses’ couldn’t be much less more likely to be playlisted on Radio 2 with out it being retitled ‘Vernon Kay is a C**t’’.
Better of all is the epic ‘Radio Eyes’, the place Jane Fonda delivers a monologue over a spaced-out sci-fi banger: if Scissor Sisters’ early lower ‘Take Your Mama’ noticed Shears getting your mum ‘jacked up on some low cost champagne’, then ‘Radio Eyes’ is him handing your Cerrone-loving uncle a toke of angel mud in Studio 54. Nearer ‘Diamonds Don’t Burn’ looks like a psych-tinged James Bond theme the place Iggy Pop (sampled from a TV interview) extolls the pure mindfulness transcendence of dropping your self within the second to music; which appears to sum up ‘Final Man Dancing’s MO.
Not like Shears’ 2018 heart-on-sleeve solo debut, it’s pure escapism and his most effortless-sounding set since bursting out of the traps almost 20 years in the past. Amid a disco-revival the place Róisín Murphy and Jessie Ware lead the pack and nearly twenty years since Scissor Sisters reinterpreted Pink Floyd‘s ‘Comfortably Numb’ as a poppers’n’podiums anthem, Shears is again to steal wigs at a home occasion you’d need the deal with of.
Particulars
- Launch date: June 2, 2023
- Document label: Mute
