By Jase Walker
Today has seen me repeatedly listening to Electric Six’s debut album ‘Fire’ in anticipation of tonight’s show. This is an album that I had on repeat for years as a teenager and 20 years on, they’re finally taking the entire album out for a set of live shows (with some other favourites) and I couldn’t be more excited. These guys have pumped out an album more or less every year since 2003, all starting with ‘Fire’ and its initial raunchy songs which saw it get repeated radio and music TV play for nearly three years since their release. I managed to catch them a while back at Manchester’s Club Academy and had a great time bopping away to many songs I knew… and many I didn’t.
Along for the ride is a band amusingly named Donkey Kung Fu which works pretty well for Electric Six’s goofy humour amongst other things and with a sold out show tonight, I’m super excited to laugh, sing, and boogie my time away tonight. After all, if the Dance Commander is ready, so too should you.
The room darkens and unfortunately interrupts a banger from Queens Of The Stone Age, with the intro to “Everybody was Kung Fu fighting”: not totally unexpected I suppose. Initially sounding somewhere between Arctic Monkeys and The Clash before suddenly cutting into a dreamy section that wouldn’t go amiss on a Pink Floyd song, they also seem to be using glitch effects here and there also, very bizarre. The more I listen the more I realize that their guitarist is one of the types that loves seeing what they can do with their sound much like the guitarist from CLT DRP. I’m getting very drawn into their weird sound, which has strayed from earlier, to stoner rock and now which is closer to the dance act Underworld. They’re even using effects and pitch shifts on the vocals as well, this is genuinely not what I expected these to be like, the sort of stuff they’re kicking out is so very at odds with my initial impressions that I’m actually quite puzzled.
To preface this, I have seen a lot of bands that I would consider very much in the weird side of things (Otto Von Schirach is a good example), but this is certainly up there with that: it’s like electro punk mixed with a dose of acid. Would this come under experimental electropunk? I genuinely have no idea, I’m definitely enjoying it as I honestly couldn’t predict their next move, there’s more twists and turns in every song than a Welsh country road and even that is an understatement. Great pick for tonight’s support though.
Onto the main show tonight, Electric Six! Not immediately getting into ‘Fire’, they’re opening with a dong off the latest album, ‘Turquoise’. We’ve got a few songs to go before hitting the ‘Fire’ round it would seem, not that it’s dampened the crowd response so far! “Song number five is called ‘Five Clowns’, it’s about five clowns’: ever the comedian is Dick Valentine, mixing absurdities with deadpan delivery, as well as being a great rock and roll vocalist, never disappoints. By this point Melkweg is absolutely rammed and I’m shoulder to shoulder with a crowd that is truly feeling the boogie. I did admittedly think we would get through ‘Fire’ first before moving onto other songs in their back catalogue but instead we’ve got a bit of foreplay to get the crowd warmed up before getting into the meat of this anniversary show.
After a quick break, it’s now time for the ‘Fire’ album. Opening of course with ‘Dance Commander’, it’s time to fully burn through the tracklist. Of course one of my favourites, ‘Naked Pictures (Of Your Mother)’, despite the name, is a legitimate massive song, followed by ‘Danger! High Voltage’ which predictably goes down a storm! No sax solo matters little, everyone is invested and screaming the words. Also evidently I don’t think I understood how much I enjoyed ‘She’s White’ until now: that chorus has a catchiness that few songs ever seem to have. ‘Improper Dancing’ with its ‘STOP. CONTINUE.” gets a solid boogie session but the crowd response to ‘Gay Bar’ is truly a sight to behold as if every bit of barely contained energy was building up to this specific moment.
Of all the things I’ve seen handed to a band, I don’t think I’ve seen someone hand them a shoe in the middle of a song, especially during ‘Nuclear War (On The Dancefloor)’. As they move onto later songs like ‘I’m The Bomb’, the shoe has magically made its way back to the front of the stage in an offering to Dick until someone swiped it away, a brilliant bit of humour. And finally from the ‘Fire’ album, arguably one of the best songs on the album, ‘Synthesizer’, a truly brilliant and chilled song to play the album out. Wrapping up a bloody excellent show that’s blasted through a varied set followed by the entire of one of my favourite albums ever.
Electric Six endure even now. Grab that new album.
- The tour continues:
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