Night Work

Here is the perfect soundtrack for your next dark-alley dance party. Flirty, flamboyant, and flagrantly sleazy, Night Work channels the sweat of a thousand dripping discos into a lean 45 minutes of new wave, retro-pop bliss.

Their first album since 2006's Ta-Dah, the Scissor Sisters have crafted an unabashedly sexy record, chock full of wee-hour come-ons and late-night temptations. Night Work pays homage to the dance-club hits of yesteryear without sounding pastiche. If anything, it succeeds in punching just enough of a pepphole into nostalgia while keeping one dancing appendage or flailing limb within the definitive now.

While the Scissor Sisters have always taken a tongue-in-cheek lyrical approach, Night Work finds the quartet offering their most consistent and complex musical work. Layers of melody are stacked to crashing crescendos in the title track. Moroder-style synths propel pulsating bass lines in the Prince-ish "Skin This Cat." There is an apocalyptic voice-over by Sir Ian McKellen in "Invisible Light" that involves whores and gladiators!

This is meticulously polished dance music. It's glamorous, and it's fun. If you manage to elude the glossy barrage of glitter bombs and beats, you'll discover enough double entendre and dubious storytelling to entertain your most private nightly ruminations. "Whole New Way" entails a voyeuristic sexual encounter on the ocean and ends with the line, "We can talk about relationships but there's better things to fill your head with." At 3 a.m., I'd agree.

• Album: Night Work (2010)
• Artist: Scissor Sisters
• Label: Downtown
• Songs: (1) Night Work (2) Whole New Way (3) Fire With Fire (4) Any Which Way (5) Harder You Get (6) Running Out (7) Something Like This (8) Skin This Cat (9) Skin Tight (10) Sex and Violence (11) Night Life (12) Invisible Light