To summarize, mortality is everywhere, and this fall, thanks to their new record Bitch, Don’t Let Me Die!, Electric Six will be everywhere too. In this case, we just end up laughing at death. It, like most of the songs on this record, is about death…but it’s kind of funny because it’s only about the death of a fake, out-of-shape drunk Santa Claus who is too fucking stupid to make it down the chimney correctly. “Big Red Arthur” is the anchor track of the album, as it emits a rock-opera bombast that is reminiscent of Radiohead sodomizing David Bowie in the center of his mind. From there, the album moves through the pop goodness of “Kids Are Evil” and “A Variation of Elaine”, the prog-rock showmanship of “Slow Motion Man”, and even a tribute to Elvis Presley in his more rotund years with “Dime Dime Penny Dime”. The album is steeped in themes of mortality, death, discorporation and discoloration…all while it tries to convince you it is actually a work of art, a labour of love.įrom the pounding, driving opener, “Drone Strikes”, through the 1970s guitar anthem “Two Dollar Two”, Bitch, Don’t Let Me Die! reveals that Electric Six knows that it is going to die, but will not go out quietly. No one more so…than Electric Six.Įlectric Six understands all this stuff as it prepares to unveil its eleventh studio album Bitch, Don’t Let Me Die!, which will be released on October 6 on Metropolis Records. No one wants to be forgotten rather quickly. If you don’t create art and you don’t love nobody…well then, you will be forgotten, rather quickly. Thusly, art and love are more important than ever, because they are now the conduits that preserve our life forces. Specifically, we tell ourselves that we can live forever, not in corporeal form, but through our creations of art…and our expressions of love. While aliens (and the government!!!!!) will always be there to kill us, we have for generations used our cold dead hands to clutch onto whatever silver lining we could sew into the dark cloud of our everlasting mortality. They will come to our planet with sinister intentions and they will immediately have the upper hand because we die…and they don’t. When extraterrestrials eventually make first contact with us within the next twenty years, the first glaringly obvious thing they will notice…is that we die. If not for our mortality, the number of years each of us would have to roam this earth would be as infinite as the sands of time running through the earth itself. It’s the primary reason we don’t live forever. It's not the kind of party that will attract the police, and that's not what you want from the Electric Six."Mortality. Streets of Gold is competent and occasionally fun, but for a band built on crazy, this album is disappointingly sane and subdued. However, the pure mania that is E6's trademark is in curiously short supply - they have no trouble tearing up their own numbers, but they sound oddly subdued here, seemingly afraid to throw caution to the wind and push the pedal to the floor - they only hit their own level of disco-punk fervor on Kiss' "Strutter." While their covers of their own tunes are good enough, it's hard to know why they bothered unless they were hoping to get a second paycheck for them 18 years after Fire was released.
Nice Guy," which sounds pretty much perfect for Dick Valentine's voice and persona).
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They've also chosen a good set of songs - while most of these numbers should be reasonably familiar, pulling Tin Machine's "Under the God" out of the bag is a gutsy move that works, and raiding the songbooks of Roky Erickson ("Click Your Fingers Applauding the Play"), Love ("Maybe the People Would Be the Times or Between Clark and Hilldale"), and James Ingram ("Yah Mo B There") shows they're willing to entertain the deep cuts fans along with the folks who prefer to hear INXS ("Don't Change"), Fleetwood Mac ("Little Lies"), and Alice Cooper ("No More Mr.
If the Electric Six had to make a living as a bar band playing other people's hits, Streets of Gold shows they could probably make a go of it - the arrangements follow the originals fairly closely while still showing some of their own personality (and one thing this band has never lacked is personality), and they can generate a good beat you can dance to. 2021's Streets of Gold is E6's first album in three years (an unprecedented break from recording, presumably imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic), and this time out they've recorded an entire set of covers, along with remakes of two E6 hits ("Danger! High Voltage" and "Gay Bar"). Electric Six's raison d'etre has always been getting the party started and throwing it into high gear, and sometimes the way to do that is to play some songs everyone already knows and can howl along with.