Short version: best album of 2005 so far.
Long version:
This is the band who did "Gay Bar" in 2003, except that everyone but
the singer has either changed his name or gotten replaced. The old
lineup of Dick Valentine, Disco, M, Surge Joebot and The Rock'N'Roll
Indian has given way to Dick Valentine, Tait Nucleus, Johnny Na$hinal,
The Colonel, Percussion World and John R. Dequindre. That last one could
be someone's actual name. Previous members include M. Cougar Mellencamp,
Dr. Blacklip Hoffman, Dr. Diet Mt. Dew and Bill Clinton.
The fact that Bill Clinton has played with Electric Six should give you
some idea of their music's massiveness, even though in this case that
name, technically, refers to some guy the Electric Six happened to have
in the studio for one song and not, if you insist on being a purist
about it, the former President of the United States.
Anyway.
Despite musical differences, Dick Valentine is essentially a Stan
Ridgway for the 21st century, fantasizing about a particular
low-class/low-status lifestyle (for Ridgway and Wall Of Voodoo, it was a
class of jobs: miners, police dispatchers, traveling salesmen, factory
lineworkers; for Valentine and Electric Six, it's kinds of leisure:
karaoke, dancing, bar-pickup sex, aimless joyriding) as a means to
explore fear, neurosis and alienation. Perversely, this would look like
slumming if the caricatures weren't transcendently ridiculously (which,
actually, Electric Six do better than Wall Of Voodoo).
The washes of synth also distinguish Señor Smoke from
Fire, not to mention the good songwriting. Last time
around, most people agreed the album had a few exceptional tracks, but
to get excited about Electrix Six in an all-purpose way, you had to like
the sound. Now I feel met halfway. I would buy the acoustic demos of
these songs in a moment. (The somber "Jimmy Carter", an almost-unfunny
joke about how awful the Backstreet Boys are, suggests that acoustic
demos might even exist.)
Even so, this is a tightrope act. Valentine's voice sounds like a
combination of the vocalists from Metallica, Tenacious D and Crash Test
Dummies, none of which I can personally sit still for. In the end, the
schtick's main appeal is the enormous shadow it casts over everything
Electric Six do, in whose cover illicit aesthetic activity can thrive.
Building a razor-sharp mixture of disco, hard rock and new wave requires
shelter from the prying eyes of the world. On the other hand, so does
rhyming "Soylent Green" with "fucking machine". Even the blunders
(like covering "Radio Ga Ga") just improve the album as a whole, kind of
like the moment at the party when you realize that things have gone Too
Far and try to summon the host, only to realize that your host is the
one holding the absinthe bottle.
Okay okay, who would win in a fight: Bill Clinton, or Percussion
World?
[Comes out February 15th on Beggars Banquet or XL or something.]
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