The Post-Rockist

Electric Six
Switzerland
[Metropolis Records; 2006]

Rockists hate Electric Six. Rockists think that Electric Six is everything good rock should not be: trashy, jokey, lewd, full of hooks and disco and naked ladies. Pitchfork Media’s review of last spring’s Señor Smoke, the Six’s second full-length album, branded the band “dick-and-fart-joke rock.” It called the album’s best song a “head-up-ass ballad.” It called the album sad, for god’s sake.

Well, Pitchfork, maybe it’s because it’s summertime, at least until next Thursday, and I’ve been driving around in my car listening to Fire and Señor Smoke (and Franz Ferdinand and Cake classics), which get me where I want to go. Maybe it’s because I’m not quite ready to give up my pulp fiction, my mojitos, or my stupid loud music until some goddamn leaves start falling and I have to stay inside listening to Joanna Newsom and the Silver Jews. Or maybe it’s because I’m from Detroit, where we are more concerned with Vengeance than we are with Fashion.

But you know what? I love this band. I love this band recklessly. The Six themselves may find my love for them embarrassing, but I am not ashamed.

Electric Six’s sound filters through several plates of synth, kitsch, and genre before it reaches one’s ears, inviting a questionable array of critical classifications including disco-metal, disco-punk, and garage-disco. If I were to contribute to these baffling gestures I would call the new album, Switzerland, a sort of pastiche of European techno-trash and disco-desert-rock, complete with twang, slide guitar, and cowboy beats. But of course this is unsatisfactory. What do I really want to say about Switzerland? I want to say that my first impulse was to be disappointed. Wasn’t the opening track, “Band in Hell,” just a little on the … slow side? Sure, the Devil and Hitler both show up before the bridge, but could I be correctly hearing a chorus with no slapstick at all? A chorus that goes something like, “I’m sorry that I lost you/ … I’m sorry that I am who I am”?

With the wisdom of several spins of the record behind me, however, I can tell you that “Band in Hell” sets a striking tone of southwestern despair and (dare I say) genuine regret that carries the whole album forward. There are venereal diseases where there were once beautiful girls. Where we once did the Macarena all night long, we are now pulling the plug on the party. One song is titled “I Wish This Song Was Louder.” It’s not, and there’s nothing that the Six can do, besides keep rocking our infernal souls into eternity.

Which is something I would not mind the teensiest bit even in the most broiling lake of fire. Down tempos, songs that go on too long, and the absence of out-of-control fever-fests like “Danger! High Voltage,” “Rock and Roll Evacuation,” and (I’m sorry, I will never honestly believe anyone who does not find this song so irresistible it hurts) “Dance Epidemic” all add some flab to Switzerland’s midriff. But there are enough songs on this album that are so ear-splittingly good that I could care less about any of the less impressive tracks. Like “I Buy the Drugs,” with its letter-perfect keyboard riffs and step-by-step breakdown of how exactly we might go about buying the drugs, and the superb “Germans in Mexico,” a mighty, wacky song about Germans abducting our daughters and selling them in Berlin that ends the whole album with a sing-along: “Sing, everybody: Deustche, Deutsche/Via con dios, amigos.”

Still, there is something exasperating about Switzerland, something troubling. How long can Electric Six make this work? Or has it stopped working already? Am I buying it long after it has expired? Is it too catchy for me to realize that I am actually bored with it?
Perhaps these are questions that the Six have been asking themselves, too; maybe that accounts for the strange fear, the Sisyphusian longing, that has crept its way into this album. I don’t know.

I do know this, Sixsters: you’ve done it again. You’ve foiled my sensibilities and I am dying for your sins on the dance floor.

But I’ve got news for you: I can’t promise I’ll do it again. It’s possible. But not a sure bet.

VIDEO: Electric Six - I Buy the Drugs

Buy the album here.

-Posted by Amy