In 2003, the Detroit band Electric Six found some fame, especially in England, through their transcendently dumb singles "Gay Bar" and "Danger! High Voltage". The songs were over-the-top and showed the jesters' almost encyclopedic hold on every brand of rock theatrics from 1975 to 1985. Sure, this may describe about 70% of your student center's Battle of the Bands entrants, but this band spiked the brew with heaping helpings of irony and self-consciousness. Kings of Leon they are not.
Electric Six are chuckling at themselves, yes-- and they also seem to be poking fun at those hammy, cartoonish expressions of manliness that crowd the playlists of every nipple-ringed Delta pledge. Thus the Electric Six discography abounds with wry renditions of cock- and garage-rock that the gender-studies set can comfortably load onto their iPods. It is quite a coup. Yet on I Shall Exterminate Everything Around Me That Restricts Me From Being the Master, the revolution sputters. It's not the old case of a perfectly low-rent aesthetic becoming somehow "compromised" by the more upmarket production you'd find on MTV, lacquered and Autotuned to oblivion. Simple predictability is to blame. When Dick Valentine opens the record, bellowing on the saloon rambler "It's Showtime!" in his mock-macho growl, over mock-operatic riffs, and clarinets and pianos, you quickly get your fill. Soon you yearn for the old Electric Six, with its perfect quantity of smarty-pants pomp, when there was a little energy and wit behind their disco infiltrators.
This just feels derivative. Once upon a time, being derivative was half of the band's shtick-- but never more than half. They cleverly and shamelessly used MOR clichés as touchstones for their twisted imagination. So the other half was the act of poking fun at this source material, as they remade all that high-stepping 1980s swagger into memorably silly, truly postmodern dance music. (Of course, this only applies to 2003's Fire.) Electric Six defenders may answer that these judgments miss the point, that there's far more to the band than tongue-in-cheek appropriation of the past. They may say their whole body of work takes aim at the carnival of American culture. Free of any "Danger"-grade hits, 2005's Señor Smoke is held up as proof of the band's satirical, capital-s Seriousness. But the fact is that "Jimmy Carter" says exactly as much about presidential folly as "Down at McDonnellzzzzz" says about the nation's waistlines. Valentine wants to decry our excess by turning it into a punchline, yet thanks to the cheese-ball arrangements and childish lyrics, neither comic effect nor social critique is ever attained. Given that Bush's America is more than a little like Weimar Germany, this should have been like fish in a barrel.
More evidence of a hidden Swiftian intellect, supposedly, is that the title of the new album comes from an anti-Weimar George Grosz cartoon. Defying any rumors of thematic gravity, Dick Valentine himself crunched the numbers, once declaring that "80 percent of our songs, maybe even higher than 80 percent" are about nothing at all. On the gleefully nihilistic Fire that was fine. But five years later, without glee, we're left with boring nihilism. Without any attempt to elaborate their sound, without dance-floor contenders or striking hooks, without straying meaningfully from the templates of straightaway rock, Exterminate simply fulfills the promise of its title: like most Dadaist jokes, this one isn't funny.
