Jake Shears - Jake Shears

Pitchfork 74

The Scissor Sisters frontman’s solo debut could’ve been a disaster: A pop star moseys down to New Orleans to find “real music.” But if you’re not a stickler for authenticity, it’s actually irresistible.

The Guardian 60

Freida Jean Records

It’s easy to forget how colossally successful the Scissor Sisters were in the mid-00s: the New York band’s 2004 debut was the 10th best-selling album of the decade in the UK, and the 40th of all time. So popular was their bouncy strain of disco-glam that it’s a wonder it has taken frontman Jake Shears this long to resurrect his brand – a whole six years since the group went on hiatus following the release of their fourth album, Magic Hour. Shears has spent the intervening years writing a memoir (Boys Keep Swinging), starring in Kinky Boots on Broadway (apparently a haven for 00s popstars – he was preceded in the role by Panic! at the Disco’s Brendon Urie) and working with artists including Cher and Queens of the Stone Age. In a sense, those two artists represent the parameters of Shears’s musical sensibility – dancefloor-friendly camp at one end, and the spirit of scuzzy rock abandon at the other. Yet his self-titled debut more conspicuously apes another of his collaborators: Elton John – a fact Shears keenly flags up by dedicating the album to him. Despite the obvious artistic debt, Shears’s debut still rings with gratifying flamboyance and robust songwriting: opener Good Friends segues merrily between boogie-woogie keys, elegiac strings and peppy sax, while Sad Song Backwards is a pleasingly theatrical, blues-spiked piano number.

Yet the sprightliness belies a harrowing narrative: the track details a bout of suicidal ideation following the breakdown of a relationship. The devastation continues into the torch song Everything I’ll Ever Need, before a shift in subject matter lets in some shards of sunlight, and with it new styles: wistful hair metal on Palace in the Sky’s guitar solo; gloriously overblown disco on S.O.B and Clothes Off. Those songs recall a slightly grimier version of his Scissor Sisters’ output, with his falsetto once again reaching helium heights, but generally the album is a departure from Shears’ previous work. If the kooky combination of throwback piano ballads and raw-nerve lyricism is unlikely to make sales history, that feels deliberate. This is no people-pleasing pop record: appealingly, its 70s-centric stew seems designed to satisfy only its maker – and, presumably, his pal Elton, too.

The Guardian 60

(Absolute Marketing)

Jake Shears’ self-titled debut could well be the spiritual successor to the multimillion selling 2004 behemoth by the Scissor Sisters, the troupe of fabulous misfits of which he was the lead singer. While there aren’t as many Wizard of Oz references, Shears’ solo album is stuffed with the same jubilant escapism and twisted fantasy. This time, though, the Technicolor of Oz is smudged around the edges.