LIVE: Electric Six Electric Suck
Friday February 10, 2006 @ 04:00 PM
By: ChartAttack.com Staff

February 9, 2006
Lee's Palace
Toronto, ON
by Alison Lang

Electric Six are one of those bands whom you're always willing to give the benefit of the doubt. After all, they're from Detroit, where many good American bands are born, and they came into fame in the best kind of way — unexpectedly. They've just released another album, Senor Smoke. Their videos are great and they don't take themselves seriously. It would be fair to assume that the crowd at Lee's Palace this past Thursday night all felt the same way I did — they were wholeheartedly, unironically looking forward to seeing the band.

That was until we realized that Electric Six wholeheartedly and un-ironically suck.

The evening started off pleasantly enough. Veteran Toronto guitar 'n' drums duo The Leather Uppers performed a respectable set of garage tunes, while the so-so So-Cal outfit Rock Kills Kid looked, played and sounded exactly like a band on the O.C. soundtrack, which they are. There were no surprises or reasons to flee the room feigning nausea or death.

Enter Electric Six. My first reaction to the entrance of the thrift-store-suit-wearing sextet was: "Good God, they're... old." Now, don't get me wrong — being paunchy and middle-aged doesn't connote an inability to rock. However, a complete lack of charisma does and the live incarnation of Electric Six decidedly lacked that quality.

Frontman Dick Valentine proved exceptionally perplexing. My only experience with him was the "Danger! High Voltage" video, where he writhes and leers in mustachioed glory. With this in mind, I expected a highly lecherous and hysterical stage persona, or at least some incandescent electric genitals. Instead, the man stood stock-still at guitar breaks, a sickly smile plastered across his face, waving idiotically to either side of the room.

When Valentine wasn't tearing the roof off with this move, he lurched arhythmically around the stage, a distracted, faintly angry-looking game-show host grin permanently etched across his face.

This lack of movement, placed in contrast to songs like "Synthesizer" and "I Lost Control (Of My Rock And Roll)," didn't come across as ironic detachment or even cheesiness. It was boring.

The fact that Valentine was as sexually magnetic as a limp handshake did little to dissuade the decidedly drunk and frat-boy laden crowd. As the band slogged through one same-sounding number after another (all of them featuring variations on the ternms "nuclear war!," "disco!" or "fire!"), the crowd seemed to mutate into a giant pustule of pathetic, growing larger and more inflamed by this lame punk rock pastiche as the night wore on.

By the time Valentine had struggled through an all-too-short cover of The Magnetic Fields' "Underwear" in — you guessed it — his underwear, my friends had all left in a mass exodus of indifference.

Alone, I fought the urge to focus on the encore, which featured two of the most exquisitely butchered cover songs ever played — by anyone, anywhere. The first, Stevie Nicks' "Stand Back," was so garbled as to be nearly incomprehensible. Then Electric Six lurched into the greatest atrocity in a night of many — their cover of Queen's "Radio Ga-Ga," which is also featured on Senor Smoke. Amidst Valentine's tuneless screams and the absentminded dribbling of the keyboards, the faint rumbling of Freddie Mercury's rolling corpse could be heard.

I left Lee's feeling oddly angry — probably because my rosy memories of dancing to "Gay Bar" in university were irrevocably destroyed upon witnessing its flaccid, brutalized live rendition. Alas, Electric Six, I feel your time is nigh. Soon you'll shuffle off to rank alongside The Bloodhound Gang, Har Mar Superstar and Tenacious D in the novelty-sex-band afterlife. Hopefully they'll have some really good moustaches there.