Scissor Sisters: Night Work

"Now we're free to be No 1," sings Jake Shears on Fire With Fire, which demands the response: "Well, we'll see about that". The Scissor Sisters scrapped an album's worth of material before Shears decamped to Berlin for inspiration and Madonna-associate Stuart Price was brought in to co-produce. The result imagines where 80s dance music would have gone if Aids had never existed; apparently, it would have stayed where it was, with glittering synth-pop and a ravenous approach to sex as the fulcrum. The album is a dizzying, infectious experience in which throbbing, Moroder-influenced beats never slacken and Shears rarely misses a chance to leer at that hunk across the dancefloor. On Invisible Light, guest Ian McKellen recites a menu of delights, from "painted whores" to "sexual gladiators", and only once, on Running Out, is there a suggestion that hedonism may not nourish the soul. By the end, you feel similarly numbed by the relentless euphoria.