Anthony's Album Guide: Electric Six, pt. 1

My handy-dandy super-subjective rating scale is explained here. 

Fire (2003) 9
Señor Smoke (2005) 8
Switzerland (2006) 8
I Shall Exterminate Everything Around Me That Restricts Me From Being The Master (2007) 9
Sexy Trash: The Rarities, Demos And Misfires Of Electric Six (2008) 8
Flashy (2008) 8
KILL (2009) 8
Zodiac (2010) 8
Heartbeats And Brainwaves (2011) 8
Absolute Pleasure (2012) 6

The best kind of cult bands are the ones with a hit. Everyone knows what it’s like to learn an obscure act has been thrilling an audience of tens if not hundreds of thousands for decades under your radar. But when it’s a group you wrote off years ago as a flash in the cultural pan, the belated discovery of their enduring resonance can be mind-blowing. I still fondly recall the shock when Cake had a number one album in 2011. The decade between Hozier’s #2 hit “Take Me To Church” and his #1 hit “Too Sweet” included a couple years where the indifferent said “wait, Hozier’s still a thing?” when he’d appear high upon a festival poster. I wouldn’t be surprised if passive radio listeners from earlier generations muttered similar surprise between Neil Young’s “Heart Of Gold” and “Rockin’ In The Free World.” I know experience from that, every time someone asks Wikipedia what ever happened to that “Gay Bar” band, that person will announce on social media that Electric Six somehow has released over a dozen albums.

 As someone who checks Wikipedia to see if another Electric Six album’s on the way, I’m here to tell you those albums are great! Not a piece of shit in the bunch! Electric Six were the soundtrack of my yuppie years in Philadelphia and New York City, putting serious wind beneath my wings by touring incessantly, releasing another glorious album of wild-eyed, smart-ass rock every autumn from 2006-2011, and always kicking ass. I praised their surprisingly good second album for the Seattle Weekly in 2006, and their surprisingly good sixth album for the Broward-Palm Beach New Times in 2010. In 2023, I made a How I Like Electric Six: The Playlist post, with a song each from fifteen studio full-lengths, hoping at least one person would notice their ongoing awesomesauce. No word on whether that worked, but I’m still going ahead with a post about their first decade of albums. Maybe this will do the trick!

Originally, Electric Six was a Detroit party band called The Wildbunch, with a few local releases too poorly distributed for me to have ever seen a copy in the wild. I knew a guy who had a tape dub of their 1999 album Rock Empire, but he didn’t remember how he got it. They eventually changed their name to Electric Six (despite only having five members) to avoid legal action from a UK art collective named The Wild Bunch (despite their only releasing two singles in the ‘80s before evolving into Massive Attack). 

Happily, the name change worked out. They soon brought in a sixth member on keyboards, and it was the unconfused UK that went nuts for the ’02 release of “Danger! High Voltage!,” a tight slice of frothing disco-metal featuring both a wailing saxophone and an uncredited but obvious duet vocal from Jack White. The video had bandleader Dick Valentine in a stylish suit and blinking codpiece, White’s vocal mimed Zelma Davis-style by an elderly actress in glasses and a blinking bra, the pair making out vigorously during the sax solos. People dug it, and the song went Top 5. The surf-metal follow-up single “Gay Bar” had neither a saxophone nor Jack White, but the hook was even more infectiously idiotic, and the video featured half-naked Abraham Lincolns bathing Dick Valentine, lifting weights, and clapping along. The empire once again dug it, and “Gay Bar” went Top 5 as well. 

Though nowhere as big in America (a common art-rock tale), stateside hipsters like myself were made aware of the phenomenon. I’ll never forget the constant, incessant losing of shits that would break out every time my local record store guru would put on their promo copy of Fire, Electric Six’s debut. Songwise, Fire is essentially a greatest-hits compilation of Wildbunch material, produced by the UK remix duo Soulchild. Or maybe “reduced,” a la Rick Rubin’s credit on LL Cool J’s Radio, as Fire features a lean, glossy sound the band never bothered (or could never afford) to recreate again. While I resent its stature in the catalog (I don’t want them playing it front-to-back live on tour, I want three hour shows with surprise deep cuts from throughout their discography!), I can’t pretend it isn’t a jaw-dropping masterpiece of dance-rock absurdity. Fire is their best, just not by the degree Earth pretends it is.

Sneering with self-possession throughout the album, Valentine is the bombastic bastard child of David Lee Roth and Dr. Frank-N-Furter (“solo!”) when he’s not the Y2K update of Bryan Ferry and David Johansen, reveling in the romantic quest underneath glam’s kitsch freakshow. A lyric stolen from Van Halen’s “Panama” and a chord progression stolen from Wire’s “Used To” (plus Roxy Music’s “Street Life” and Queen’s “Radio Ga Ga” in the set list), suggested this aesthetic didn’t come by chance. “Now I ain’t educated but I sure ain’t stupid/ and I know what is wrong and I know what is right/ don’t give me your religion or the US government/ I met my baby in the darkness of the night.” That’s one hell of an adage, and just a drop in Fire’s adage bucket.

Half the band left after recording Fire, but the more tour-ready line-up that played the Siren Festival in 2004 still blew my mind. Five guys sweating through their suits behind a similarly stylish Valentine, who often stood still and grinned between lines, so that the frantic wave of “hello,” or the revelation of dollars in his wallet resonated like a high-kick off the drum riser. I forget exactly why the band was no longer on XL (then-home of Radiohead and future home of Adele), but the ensuing label drama meant that the 2005 album Señor Smoke was released by Warners in England, and nowhere back home. Three new songs shared by a British website on RealMedia (those were the days!) suggested the band hadn’t lost any sense of spiritual mission or lyrical inspiration (“we’ll karaoke all night long/ we’ll Macarena to the break of dawn!”). But it would be another year before the darkwave/industrial-centric indie Metropolis released the album here. By that point, the aforementioned Queen cover (which Warners insisted upon them recording) had destroyed their UK chart momentum. Maybe the video shouldn’t have opened with Valentine in a bodysuit, mustache and fake teeth, dancing on Freddie Mercury’s grave. Britons are more sensitive about him than Abe Lincoln.

A&R may have been disappointed by the lack of a surefire hit on Señor Smoke, but it’s a fantastic follow-up to Fire, establishing Electric Six as an absurd but effective album act chronicling not just romantic rapture and frustration at its most surreal, but life itself. “Mr President, make a little money sending people you don’t know to Iraq!/ Mr. President, I don’t like you! You don’t know how to rock!” “Here come the future boys!/ They’re making money!/ Oh my god!” “The record is skipping/ the dance is disturbing/ the Jacksons are reuniting/ they’re going on tour/ and I can’t take it anymore!” The acoustic ballad ruminates on the effects of the 1980 election and is capped by a Backstreet Boys quote. There’s no lack of hooks, especially with aforementioned keyboardist Tait Nucleus now contributing to the recordings. If anything, there might be too much catchy madness for people who don’t want to live on Planet Goofball. But if your love of glam came from records rather than posters, Electric Six were the rare 21st century act that delivered on the post-apocalyptic pop-rock mania promised on Here Come The Warm Jets and New York Dolls.

Switzerland, the second 2006 album (if you were American), hits easy culture clash jokes like “Germans In Mexico” a little too hard, but features all-time highlights like the gregarious piano jam “I Buy The Drugs,” the pummel-drone of “Mr. Woman” (“turning people into products is easy/ turning idiots into stars is easier”) and “There’s Something Very Wrong With Us, So Let’s Go Out Tonight.” If only the Six had a visual shtick worthy of that last title, they might have had an audience worthy of it as well. But Dick Valentine was revealing himself to be more of a Norm MacDonald on stage than a David Bowie. 

I Shall Exterminate Everything Around Me That Restricts Me From Being The Master isn’t just their most unwieldy title, but, at sixteen tracks, their most unwieldy album. It’s also my pick for best-in-show of the post-Fire era. One of its least entertaining songs is the one that fearfully recounts the plot of Electric Dreams. Ballads like “When I Get To The Green Building” and “Randy’s Hot Tonight!” are oddly affecting visions of dystopian euphoria, while “Lenny Kravitz,” “Rip It!” and “I Don’t Like You” show off relentless punk flash. “Every problem can be solved by burning books/ every savior’s crucified next to crooks/ every human being starts with two naughty looks” are the last lines of the album, followed by another sax solo. In a perfect world, Exterminate would have earned them the same attention Wilco got with their art-pop breakthrough Summerteeth. But the lack of a perfect world is why we get Dick Valentine lyrics.

Feeling their oats despite the lack of Wilco-esque critical admiration, Flashy opens with the self-referential “Gay Bar Part 2” (as in “the queue of soft, steaming shits demanding…”) before careening into yet more glorious horn freakouts (“Formula 409”), blitzkrieg art-garage (“We Were Witchy Witchy White Women”) and…uh…reggae (“Your Heat Is Rising”). Allen Ravenstine and Steve Mackay aren’t on this album, but if you get excited by those names, the keyboard gurgles ands sax wails here will thrill you. “Watching Evil Empires Fall Apart” is highly recommended to anyone who thought ABBA’s “Waterloo” needed more lyrics about Napoleon and an appearance by Steve Mackay. Or at least wouldn’t have been mad about that. 

(The Sexy Trash compilation, available only at shows, is strictly for the heads who own all previous albums, but will entertain those heads and features Valentine admitting an acoustic demo could be Tenacious D. He knows, smartass.)

KILL might be their angriest album, the road dogs risking everything to say "except for GBV and Devo/ nothing seems to redeem Ohio." “Waste Of Time And Money” describes the horror of being left for dead by an upwardly mobile lover (“after five boxes of wine/ my friends opine/ that I should consider therapy”). “My Idea Of Fun,” with its ghostly organ washes, describes the joy of leaving people for dead (“flashbulbs begin to pop/ as I bitch-slap my way to the top”). “Egyptian Cowboy” sounds like Hold Steady if Craig Finn was funnier (“my songs are tasty pies/ fresh, oven-baked, and filled with lies”).

The last song I hoped against hope would make Electric Six even a little more popular is “Jam It In The Hole,” from 2010’s jubilant, dizzy Zodiac. “Stop! We are good times! We’re from the eighties and we’re here to help!” might be the best opening lyric of this century, and “I am God’s love, baby/ I’m Courtney Love, baby/ who the hell are you?” is at least a solid bridge. Everything that happens between and after those lines is a joyous, new wave bop (the sax is back!), despite or because of rhyming “what’s the market value of a soul” with “greasing up the pleasure pole.” Valentine himself called “Jam” the best song he’d ever written at concerts, but - despite remarkably good fan-made videos for several of the songs, and a cattle-prodded cover of “The Rubberband Man” - nothing changed the band’s minor profile. 

Heartbeats And Brainwaves is the first album produced by guitarist John Nash (fellow guitarist Zach Shipps producing the previous four), with the sound less proto-punk panoramic, more modern synth-nightmare. “It Gets Hot” is their first song to feature a guest rap, albeit one less Ludacris and more The Dude On Michael Jackson’s “Black Or White.” The uptick of garish hooks makes the album a highlight (favorites include the eerily desperate “French Bacon” and “Hello! I See You!”s invite to annihilation), but titles like “Food Dog” and “Interchangeable Knife” hint at Valentine realizing he doesn’t have to try so hard at this point. And probably didn’t have to for the five albums previous.

2012 was the first year the band didn’t release a new studio album since 2004, and the first year they played Fire on stage in full. Not exactly clocking in, Dick Valentine put out his first acoustic solo album (Jack Black comparisons be damned!), a second album by his synth duo side-project Evil Cowards, and the band released their first live album, Absolute Pleasure. I’ve never been to the First Avenue in Minneapolis or the Double Door in Chicago, but I saw these guys at the Khyber in Philadelphia and the Bowery Ballroom in New York, and I refuse to believe the audience noises weren’t smothered in echo, if not punched in from Budokan. The setlist is nice, but Valentine sounds winded and the only new track is a cover of The Osmonds’ “Crazy Horses,” which no band could make crazier than the original. With Shipps amicably leaving the group after its recording, Pleasure feels more like an epitaph for their first phase than a victory lap. “You can laugh, you can cry/ you can live, you can die/ spend your days asking why/but you can’t ignore my techno” goes the last song on Fire and on Absolute Pleasure. While I still wonder why you'd ignore their techno, it's now tragically clear one can.

To come (someday) in part 2: they're still around and still good!

Fire and I Shall Exterminate... are respectively at 14 and 36 on my Top 300 Albums of All Time. I'm telling you this because I've found people are more inclined to discuss and share reviews if there's a quantitative element at the top or bottom they can easily debate. Prove me right! Direct correspondence can be shipped off to anthonyisright at gmail dot com.