Sounds From The Junkshop #95 - Electric Six

 

"Like Jimmy Carter, like electric underwear/A canny idea that never had the chance to go anywhere..." - Electric Six - Jimmy Carter

One thing you find when you're putting SFTJ's together, especially for the years where your memory's a bit...erm, waxed shall we say, is that you often find yourself having to move the timelines you thought were correct around in your head a bit. For example, as we move on to 2003, I'd kind of had it in my head that the garage rock revival headed up by the Strokes and the White Stripes had already started to peter out the previous year. Looking at some of the entries we've got coming up in the next few weeks, I may have remembered that slightly wrong as there's definitely a few bands who fall into that category coming up in the near future.

For this entry though, we're moving west from New York to Detroit. Electric Six were one of a number of bands who broke through in 2003-04 sort of time thanks to Jack White's patronage (he even provided backing vocals on their Danger! High Voltage! single) I have to be honest straight from the off, I've never been a big fan of the White Stripes. I mean I liked a few of their punkier moments like Fell In Love With A Girl but I always found that "oh no, I'm a genuine bluesman me, not some skinny pale bloke from the northern states who's in a gimmick band with his wife-turned-sister, honest guv" thing a bit unconvincing. Plus, similar to Josh Homme or Johnny Borrell, he always just seemed to come across as a bit of a pretentious and unpleasant character both in interviews and live - I saw the White Stripes live once at Leeds Festival in 2002 (I think) where for every short sharp burst of garage punk energy we had to put up with some tedious blues noodling so Jack could prove how "authentic" he was. Spare me pal. Groups like that have long been the bane of my music listening existence right back to the early '90s likes of Thunder and the Black Crowes in the Britrock era through Ocean Colour Scene, Proud Mary and solo Paul Weller during Britpop, the White Stripes, Alter Bridge and Wolfmother in the early noughties and right up to the dreadful likes of Greta Van Fleet nowadays, humourless musos taking all the fun and entertainment out of music in the name of "authenticity". Fuck the lot of 'em.

Which makes it all the weirder that Electric Six, a band who very much WERE a fun technicolour explosion of charisma, weirdness and entertainment in the early noughties initially got their breakthrough via Jack White. Of course, a lot of people will probably remember them for their two Top 5 hits and indie disco staples Danger High Voltage (which featured White on backing vocals) and Gay Bar but what you might not know is that the band are still very much a going concern today with no less than fifteen albums to their name. And although I enjoyed those first two hit singles, I think it was actually their second album Senor Smoke that was the one which properly reeled me in.

So let's fast forward a little bit to 2005 and your friendly writer has volunteered to review Senor Smoke for the webzine I was working for at the time (Leeds Music Scene I think?). By this time the group were pretty much on life support - they hadn't built on those first two hits commercially and the lead-off single to Senor Smoke had been a cover of Queen's Radio Ga-Ga (which they'd been closing their live sets with for a while at this point) which had a genuinely hilarious video, scraped the Top 20 then promptly disappeared again. The album had essentially been absolutely panned everywhere from Kerrang through the NME to Classic Rock and I think I was probably morbidly curious as to how terrible it could actually be (My Life Story syndrome if you will). I typed the review up after my first listen and I think I gave it 3/5 and said something along the lines of "I'm not quite sure if this is the best or worst album ever but it's certainly entertaining". But the thing is, I kept coming back to that album for months afterwards. There was something about the sheer silliness of it (not to mention that it was basically wanton commercial suicide via surrealism) that meant it ended up being one of my favourite albums of that year.

If the old saying about those who the gods destroy they first make mad is true then I suspect Dick Valentine and co must have been keeping a very close eye for stray lightning bolts being fired from the sky around this era because this is very much not a sensible album at all. The opening track Rock 'n' Roll Evacuation included a totally unironic line of "Mr President, I don't like you/'COS YOU DON'T KNOW HOW TO ROCK!!" while elsewhere, Bite Me was basically the group trying to cram as many euphemisms for oral sex into one song as they could ("Are you ready for American Strike Force?/Are you ready for the mystery meat?"), Jimmy Carter appeared to be an acoustic lament dedicated to former US presidents and the Backstreet Boys, Dance-a-thon 2005 was some sort of Latino shuffle about what appears to be a TV show that's a cross between Strictly Come Dancing and The Running Man and Vibrator is about being trapped in a lift with a woman who would rather...erm, seek solace in her plastic pal than attend to your needs. Well, we've all been there. Oh and Be My Dark Angel includes the immortal lyric "When bad girls start wrestling, everybody wants to be the next referee" Again, I think we can all relate.

Senor Smoke did nothing chart-wise and Electric Six were rapidly dropped from their record deal with Beggars Banquet soon afterwards but I do remember rabidly extolling this album's virtues to most people I met that year. My favourite memory was one of my friends who worked in a record shop greeting me with the words "Oh yeah, you know how when we were drunk last week you told me how that Electric Six record sounded like a completely mad version of Franz Ferdinand getting Tom Jones in to do the vocals and Bill Bailey to do their songwriting on their next record? Well, I've listened to it and I can't believe this but I actually agree with you..." Proof positive that if you're gonna go down the commercial suicide route, you should just do it in the most spectacular way possible.

And Electric Six? Well, they just shrugged and carried on going. I've continued to roll with them ever since and, seventeen years and probably nearly as many albums later, their output isn't getting any more sensible. Album number three, 2005's Switzerland,  included such classics as the self-explanatory I Buy The Drugs, the utterly batshit country strum of Pink Flamingos and The Band In Hell which contains the lyrics "The devil plays guitar/Hitler's on the drums/And I'm the man on the microphone/Yeah, this is what I've become..."

2007's brilliantly named I Shall Exterminate Everything Around Me That Restricts Me From Being The Master was even better with the insane plastic soul croon of Down At McDonnelzzz (which has a chorus I guarantee you will not be able to get out of your head for days afterwards), the disco swagger of Dance Pattern, the pounding Rip It! (which managed to rhyme ocean, motion, lotion, potion, devotion and, oh yes, Nova Scotian in the same verse) and the scuzzy riff-fests of Feed My Fuckin' Habit and Lenny Kravitz being up there with their best stuff.

Hand on heart, Electric Six do tend to put out a LOT of albums (literally one a year up until a few years ago) and a lot of their more recent efforts tend to kind of blur into one although they've always got a good record of putting a few gems in there to make them worth buying like Big Red Arthur (an ode to a drunk Santa Claus impersonator falling down a chimney and being impaled on spikes at the bottom of it) off Don't Let Me Die Bitch! or Adam Levine (a brilliantly foul-mouthed diatribe against the Maroon 5 tosspot) off Mustang being well worth seeking out. Either way though, we're due a new album from them this year (they've been suspiciously quiet for a bit with only a slightly disappointing covers album Streets of Gold surfacing of late) and hopefully it'll be up to the usual standards of wonderful insanity when it arrives. In the meantime though, I'd heartily recommend pretty much all of their back catalogue for listening to. Referring to a band as sounding like the bastard sons of Sparks gives them some big shoes to fill but I genuinely think that in Electric Six's case it's a deserved compliment. Give 'em a listen and see for yourself.