Electric Six - Zodiac

  by Benjamin Howarth

published: 13 / 10 / 2010

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Review

The law of diminishing returns holds so steady in pop music that Professor Brian Cox is set to team up with Stephen Hawking to make a TV show about it. Where there was once a successful band, there will eventually be a less successful band. Planetary systems align around this unflinchingly rigid trend, the invisible hand guiding the pop charts. And yet, as with all aspects of physics, there are occasional mysteries and fluctuations, as yet unexplained. Here’s one: whatever happened to the Electric Six? Singing ‘Danger High Voltage’, they jumped straight to the top of the charts in 2003, with a little help from Jack White, and stayed there with ‘Gay Bar’. They were, by all accounts, very trendy indeed, riding the Detroit boom that followed the sudden superstardom of their friends the White Stripes. But, quickly, the music press turned against them. The excuse given was that frontman Dick Valentine’s decision to sack most of his bandmates provoked them to lose their bluesy edge. In fact, what journalists didn’t like was that they had been taken in. They thought the Electric Six were being ironic, but in fact they had been joking, an altogether different and altogether more preferable trait, unless you happen to have once worked for 'Melody Maker'. Unfortunately, this meant that very few people now even know the Electric Six are still making records. Fewer still know that their recent albums have actually been better than their acclaimed debut. Sales figures notwithstanding, Valentine (real name Tyler Spencer) has been vindicated, as his new line-up has consistently proved more versatile then his old one, meaning that Electric Six have spread themselves out across almost all areas of pop music This album is knowingly silly, almost all of the time. The mad-ska of ‘American Cheese’ is infectiously catchy, and really is a song about plastic wrapped cheese slices (among other things). And yet, its bursting with ideas. Take the fifth song, ‘Doom and Gloom and Doom and Gloom’, which breaks down into a loose-jazz coda that wouldn’t have been out of place on ‘Dark Side Of The Moon’. It’s thrilling and entirely surprising. White Stripes fans would surely kill for a breakout of such spontaneousness, and the nicer ones would also be rather impressed by the unflinchingly catchy disco of ‘Jam It In The Hole’. Meanwhile, the aforementioned ‘American Cheese’ morphs into a spacey new wave epic. The album comes together spectacularly on its final track, ‘Talking Turkey’, a song that is simply bursting with jive. Can there really be any higher compliment than that for a pop song? There are plenty of moments here that Dick Valentine and the boys can line up against their best songs (which are, in my opinion, ‘Slices Of You’, ‘Germans In Mexico’, ‘Dance Commander’ and, yes, their two big hits). If you still find yourself able to hum ‘Gay Bar’, you’ll like this too.

Track Listing:-

1 After Hours
2 American Cheese
3 Clusterfuck!
4 Countdown To The Countdown
5 Doom And Gloom And Doom And Gloom
6 Jam It In The Hole
7 I Am A Song!
8 It Ain't Punk Rock
9 The Rubberband Man
10 Table And Chairs
11 Talking Turkey

Band Links:-

http://www.electricsix.com/
https://www.facebook.com/Electric-6-15
https://twitter.com/electric6

Label Links:-

https://www.facebook.com/TooManyRobots
https://toomanyrobots.bandcamp.com/
https://twitter.com/toomanyrobots

Have a Listen:-