"Doom and Gloom and Doom and Gloom" swings a saxophone recalling "Future Is the Future" and "Watching Evil Empires Fall Apart." "Countdown to the Countdown" and "It Ain't Punk Rock" employ more barreling, infectious bluster ( "Why are all the white people filled with hate?/Why do archeologists excavate?/Number 88/Number 88/Number 88"). Woman" before them, "After Hours" and "Jam It in the Hole" are sexed-up jukebox hits from an alternative dimension.
That solitary existence shows itself in the recordings Zodiac is easier to compare to the band's earlier albums than to anyone else's. "I just don't see us as the kind of band that people get together and want to be like," admits Valentine. Too brawny, too brazen, or too beautiful for any scene out there (all at once in the video for "Randy's Hot Tonight!"), the Six are practically without peers. Still, it's hard to imagine the NPR crowd fully getting behind technicolor trash like "We Were Witchy Witchy White Women," which builds to an instrumental frenzy worthy of early Pere Ubu - even with Of Montreal's prop-pop operas worming their way in.Īnd though it's easy to hear traces of the band's humor in mainstream hits like Finger Eleven's "Paralyzer" ( "This club will hopefully be closed in three weeks/That would be cool with me") and the oeuvre of 3OH!3 (whose "Do the Helen Keller and talk with your hips" isn't far from the Six's "Dress me up like JFK/Hide in the grassy knoll/And blow me away!"), proto-crunkcore isn't a real genre any more than proto-punk. During Valentine's regular visits to late night Fox News show Red Eye, host Greg Gutfeld quotes his lyrics with Chris Farley-like admiration, and last year's Kill was the first album to garner enough positive reviews to score in the green on Metacritic since Fire.
"If someone is doing your dirty work for you, all the better," says Valentine, who loved a fan's clip from Beijing for "Getting Into the Jam" enough to put it on the band's MySpace page. "And now I think we have more mature, more productive members of society coming."Ĭreative ones too YouTube features a plethora of inventive short films and class projects scored to hits and album tracks alike - some with more views than E6's actual videos. "We went through a solid period there, between '03 and '06, where just filled with assholes," says Valentine. Happily housed by electro-goth outlet Metropolis Records since 2006, E6's consistent release schedule (they've dropped an album every fall since signing with the label) and constant touring brings in new admirers as the fratboys seduced by Fire fall off. Though assumed by some to be an overplayed joke, the band hasn't been sliding further into obscurity.
" definitely put our foot in the door and got noticed by people," says singer Dick Valentine, " when the radio stopped caring about us, that's when we relied on the people who stayed with the band like life preservers." But where the commercial success of those infinitely more earnest combos grew gradually from cult roots, the Six has enjoyed an inverted trajectory. If the aforementioned touch of Tenacious D isn't a deal-breaker, listening to the Six's later, more lyrical LPs reveals a band with traits similar to critical favorites Of Montreal, the Hold Steady, and the Drive-By Truckers - prolific plunderers of rock's past who refuse to check their intelligence and verbosity at the theater door. Folks familiar with this Detroit outfit slot nicely into three distinct groups: casual fans with a couple of dance floor smashes like "Gay Bar" and "Danger! High Voltage" from 2003's Fire on their iPods, cultists who've memorized the six(!) comparatively obscure albums that followed, and the concerned friends and family of the second group who can't comprehend how their loved ones could devote so much time and enthusiasm to a band that sounds like Jack Black leading Roxy Music on an endless roid rage ( "One and one and one and one and one I'm pretty sure adds up to five/Teenage alcoholics can be oh so entertaining when they drive!"). Plenty of Electric Six's converted would follow these well-dressed freaks and their amped anthems of social and romantic chaos to the end of the Earth, but not everyone's that committed.