Album Review: Electric Six – Kill

Kill is the sixth album from Detroit rockers Electric Six, and it’s out today at fine music retailers throughout North America. If you don’t normally listen to music but love gaming, you might remember Electric Six as having just had three of their songs released as downloadable content for Rock Band.

I’ve been absolutely obsessed with the band ever since I first heard them in 2008. I was late to the party, I know. I have no idea how I missed the likes of “Gay Bar” and “Danger! High Voltage” when they were first released but believe me, unlike a lot of people who probably dug those songs and forgot about the band, I dig pretty much everything Electric Six has done. They’re exceptionally talented and they’ve got something a lot of current bands do not: Balls. Electric Six is loud, obnoxious, filthy, and aggressive, and they’re not afraid to show this.

Kill, incidentally, is named after the main recurring theme of the album: killing. Nearly every song touches upon this theme, a variant of it, or at least has the word “kill” in it; even the songs that seem fairly lighthearted at first turn out to be somewhat twisted. In this respect, Kill is similar to the band’s first release, Fire (which had the recurring theme of fire).

Although Kill is a representation of a much more mature band, Electric Six is showing no signs of mellowing out, and while the music on Kill is quite varied, there’s an ongoing momentum via heavy, distorted, and layered guitar riffs.

In fact the album is just as heavy as anything the band has done, and over the past six years since the release of Fire, the band has somehow shown tremendous musical growth while maintaining what made them so good in the first place, despite several lineup changes along the way. They never got boring despite experimenting with different sounds and approaches from album to album.

I’ve seen and read others brush the band off as a “joke” band because their more commercially successful songs have been funny and because their videos are all absurd. But being funny is not the same as being a joke, and the two things should never be confused. Electric Six is definitely the former.

Kill kicks off with “Body Shot,” which also happens to be the first single off the album. Drums and synth drive the song for the most part and, while the guitars build up and scale back several times throughout it, the main instrument is Dick Valentine’s powerful voice. The frontman steals the show, as always, with vocals that range from falsetto to whispering to anthem-like war cries. It’s unreal that anyone should be able to sing like this, yet he pulls it off masterfully.

The band released the video for “Body Shot” mid-month and it’s so NSFW that no amount of editing would make it safe for television. I know I recently said the Pato Pooh video was one of the best of all time, but the “Body Shot” video really is the best video ever.

Another favorite of mine, “Egyptian Cowboy,” is almost two songs in one. Each part on its own would be incredibly grating as its own song, but the style changes between the verse and chorus/bridge are perfectly timed and executed. Electric Six’s drummer, Percussion World, switches from balls-out attack mode to the song’s more subtle, jazzier portion with such finesse that he makes it sounds easy. As a drummer, I can tell you: It isn’t.

Even when it comes to love songs, the staple of most rock music, Electric Six doesn’t do things the way other bands do. With “Steal Your Bones,” Dick Valentine croons, “I will love you forever, though you surely won’t remember everything I did to make you love me,” and it’s revealed that the stealing of bones is required for cloning, thus ensuring perpetual happiness. The vocal delivery here is creepy but with harmonies so beautiful they eclipse the sleaze factor.

I’d be lying if I said I knew what “The Newark Airport Boogie” was about, since most of the vocals have been hilariously auto-tuned to the point of being unintelligible, no doubt a commentary on the technique’s mundane overuse in modern top 40 hits. But the song itself is solid, and from what I could make out from the lyrics, also quite funny. The album wraps up nicely with the very retro sounding synth-heavy “White Eyes,” a song that sounds like nothing else on the album but leads back nicely into the first track should you care for an immediate re-listen of the entire album (which I always do).

I could go on about each of the tracks in detail, but it is best that you just listen to them for yourself. I’ve listened to Kill over 200 times now, and I’m still not burned out on it. In fact, I’m actually still discovering little things I hadn’t previously noticed about it, such as subtle instrument flourishes buried within layers of musical depth.

Well done, Electric Six. Here’s to 200 more listens, at least.