The MC5, 1968: "The Motor City is burning." Awesome Color, 2008: "In Detroit, the fires burn." Beyond suggesting that, after 40 years, Detroit is no more closer to joining the ranks of America's most livable cities, these lines don't so much illustrate what connects Brooklyn-via-Ann Arbor trio Awesome Color and their spiritual forbears-- namely shared Michigan roots and a mutual love of fierce, fuzzboxed riffage beefed up by a fleeting free-jazz jones-- as what separates them. Coming from the MC5, the song "Motor City Is Burning" was a direct response to the race riots that had set the city ablaze in 1967, but also a resigned one, its sluggish bluesy lurch suggesting that, in an impoverished America, violent urban unrest is a sad inevitability. Awesome Color's "Burning", on the other hand, is not some Iraq-era update to the MC5's Vietnam-generation address; it's really just about burning shit up on a Devil's Night bender, because, presumably, fire is, like, totally rad.
That would make Electric Aborigines something like Kick Out the Jams as rewritten by Beavis and Butthead, which isn't a completely ridiculous proposition-- for all their John Sinclair sermonizing and White Panther provocation, the MC5 just wanted to get laid like any other bunch of longhairs ("I'm the man for ya baby!") and as such, Awesome Color's band of scuzz-rock is decidedly less interested in teenage riots than teenage lust. In their hands, an exhortation to "step up!" is not a call to arms to overthrow the government, but a stern warning not get cock-blocked by other dudes in the bar who are macking on the same girl you've been eyeing.
If Electric Aborigines assumes a pronounced cock-rock strut than Awesome Color's more wiggy 2006 debut, it's a shift that at least accurately reflects the evolution of Michigan rock at the turn of the 1970s, when the MC5 and their proto-punk peers the Stooges were swept aside by the arena-conquering likes of Grand Funk and Ted Nugent. That's not to suggest the band have degenerated into Jet-level bar-band buffoonery; Awesome Color's formidable guitarchitecture still produces some moments of awe-- particularly in the gale-force psych-jazz splatter of the opening "Eyes of Light"-- and their riffs don't so much crunch as twitch and tremble, lending them a simmering tension that makes the band something more threatening and strange than a simple classic-rock revivalist act.
But all the energy expended on figuring out cool effects-pedal settings means that certain other matters-- melodies, hooks, lyrics-- are treated as after-thoughts. This wouldn't be so much of an issue if the band were dealing in extended, Comets on Fire-style freakouts, but the songs on Electric Aborigines are beholden to traditional verse/chorus/geetah structures that ultimately emphasize their shortcomings in the songwriting department. So what you're left with are half-baked tunes that confuse the repetitive for anthemic ("Outside Tonight", "Step Up"), or that issue vague commands to "taste it right now" ("Taste It") and "do it right tonight" ("Do It Right"), without really making us give a shit about the "it." Like the Hallow's Eve fires described on the aforementioned "Burning", Electric Aborigines is a celebration of cheap thrills without purpose. But even if you're prepared to accept it on those limited terms, you still feel short-changed.
