Album: Scissor Sisters

The single "I Don't Feel Like Dancin'" doesn't bode well for Ta-Dah, sounding like yet another footnote to Seventies kitsch - in this case to Leo Sayer, whose terpsichorean urge is contradicted by the band with a similar romping combination of falsetto vocal and stomping piano. And when it's followed in similar manner here by "She's My Man", whose blend of Elton and ELO recalls their debut album, you start to wonder if there's more to The Scissor Sisters than just a sort of I ™ The Seventies tribute band. There is, but you have to search beyond the disco kitsch to find it in pieces such as "I Can't Decide", a jauntily sinister sex-killer dilemma set to a good-timey combination of tack piano and kazoo, or the dark-themed "Intermission", whose arrangement has an antique vaudevillean tone akin to Van Dyke Parks. Throughout, an undercurrent of doom and danger courses beneath the album's surface, from the strangulation references in "She's My Man" to the person preparing for death in "The Other Side". It may be the sickest good-time album ever made, a guilty pleasure indeed.

DOWNLOAD THIS: 'I Can't Decide', 'Intermission', 'Ooh', 'Lights'