Take the fifth song, ‘Doom and Gloom and Doom and Gloom’, which breaks down into a loose-jazz coda that wouldn’t have been out of place on ‘Dark Side Of The Moon’. The mad-ska of ‘American Cheese’ is infectiously catchy, and really is a song about plastic wrapped cheese slices (among other things).Īnd yet, its bursting with ideas. This album is knowingly silly, almost all of the time. Sales figures notwithstanding, Valentine (real name Tyler Spencer) has been vindicated, as his new line-up has consistently proved more versatile then his old one, meaning that Electric Six have spread themselves out across almost all areas of pop music Fewer still know that their recent albums have actually been better than their acclaimed debut. Unfortunately, this meant that very few people now even know the Electric Six are still making records. They thought the Electric Six were being ironic, but in fact they had been joking, an altogether different and altogether more preferable trait, unless you happen to have once worked for 'Melody Maker'.
In fact, what journalists didn’t like was that they had been taken in. The excuse given was that frontman Dick Valentine’s decision to sack most of his bandmates provoked them to lose their bluesy edge. They were, by all accounts, very trendy indeed, riding the Detroit boom that followed the sudden superstardom of their friends the White Stripes.īut, quickly, the music press turned against them. Singing ‘Danger High Voltage’, they jumped straight to the top of the charts in 2003, with a little help from Jack White, and stayed there with ‘Gay Bar’. Here’s one: whatever happened to the Electric Six? Planetary systems align around this unflinchingly rigid trend, the invisible hand guiding the pop charts.Īnd yet, as with all aspects of physics, there are occasional mysteries and fluctuations, as yet unexplained. Where there was once a successful band, there will eventually be a less successful band.
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The law of diminishing returns holds so steady in pop music that Professor Brian Cox is set to team up with Stephen Hawking to make a TV show about it.