“I Wish This Song Was Louder” throbs with a newfound menace, while “Pink Flamingos” and “Germans in Mexico” could have come from a Six-scored spaghetti western soundtrack. The subject matter (girls, money, the Devil) remains unchanged, but the approach ranges from the meditative to the obsessed. Switzerland is the Electric Six’s “serious” album.
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There’s also a faithful take on Queen’s “Radio Ga Ga.” Even though the highlights are all up-tempo body movers, the slower “Jimmy Carter” - which conflates the Backstreet Boys’ “Everybody (Backstreet’s Back)” with William Butler Yeats’ “The Second Coming” - points the way to the band’s future. “Devil Nights” and “Bite Me” prove that the Electric Six formula still bubbles with synth-accessorized energy. “Dance Epidemic” stands as the definitive Electric Six song, encapsulating the band’s sound in two-and-a-half minutes of dance-floor rock. While there are fewer instant classics here than on the debut, the songs that do stand out are all better than their predecessors. Despite the seismic personnel shift, the album stands as a seamless refinement of Fire‘s disco rock. Dequindre on bass (replacing interim bassist Frank Lloyd Bonaventure) and Tait Nucleus? (who appeared on Fire as a supporting musician) on synthesizers. The lineup for Señor Smoke is the Colonel and Johnny Na$ional on guitars, Percussion World on drums, John R. (The album’s other single, “Gay Bar,” would become something of an albatross to the band, requiring an almost-bitter rebuttal/sequel track five years later.) Valentine’s prediction on the album-closing “Synthesizer” that “You can’t ignore my techno” would be proven true, but not after considerable behind-the-scenes changes.Įveryone on Fire (except Dick Valentine) was gone before the next album’s release. Guest vocals by Jack White helped propel the manic single “Danger! High Voltage” into the UK charts. Quoting Van Halen’s “Panama” and punctuating lyrics with Michael Jackson-style “hee hee hee”s, “I’m the Bomb” lays bare the band’s ’80s iconography. Tracks like “Electric Demons in Love” and “Nuclear War (On the Dance Floor)” make the band’s thematic direction immediately clear. on drums - recorded the Six’s 2003 debut, Fire. The original lineup - Valentine on vocals, the Rock-n-Roll Indian and Surge Joebot on guitars, Disco on bass, and M. The band formed in 1996 as the Wildbunch, gaining popularity by playing some of the city’s sketchiest clubs. Ultimately, the Six come across like a demented hybrid of AC/DC and Prince, releasing party albums dedicated to sexy girls, fat stacks of cash, fire and the Devil. When lead singer Dick Valentine belts out “Your body goes to waste every minute you don’t give it to me” (on Señor Smoke‘s “Dance Epidemic”), he does so with the level of (contrived?) conviction usually reserved for songs about social change or world hunger.
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Emerging from a scene marked by garage rock fetishism, Detroit’s Electric Six instead play a formidably danceable mix of rock, new wave, whiteboy funk and disco. The band doesn’t take itself seriously, but imbues even the most absurd songs with a passion easily mistaken for earnestness.