Danger!High Voltage

Electric Six isn’t a band to obsess over its albums. Having released an album a year over the past six years is proof enough that this group doesn’t get bogged down in the creative process or the studio.
For that matter, Electric Six often doesn’t do much of anything in advance of making an album – including songwriting. For its 2010 effort, “Zodiac,” the band had all of one idea for a song in place when the time to record rolled around. Electric Six frontman Dick Valentine doesn’t seem to mind.
“I kind of went into (it) saying ‘Oh my God, I’ve only got one song done. Is this record going to suck?’” Valentine observed in a recent phone interview. “It’s kind of exciting to like in a span of a month go from having no idea what it’s going to sound like to wow, this is going to be a good album.”
The lack of planning and preparation seems to be working just fine for Electric Six, which released “Zodiac” last fall and will continue its streak of annual album releases later this fall when yet another new CD, “Heartbeats and Brainwaves,” arrives.
Already firmly established as a party band with lyrical wit to spare, a knack for catchy melodies and a love of dance-worthy rock and roll, Electric Six will have a tough act to follow, considering “Zodiac” is one of its most consistently entertaining albums.

“Zodiac” featured some driving rock on “After Hours” and “Countdown to the Countdown,” some smart funk-rock on “Cluster—-,” and a hook-filled slab of dance rock on “Jam It in the Hole.” It’s all topped off by a righteously rocking cover of the Spinners’ “Rubberband Man.”
The Electric Six began developing its varied style and considerable personality in Detroit in 1996 under its original name of the Wildbunch. The band initially didn’t get much going and broke up for a couple of years before re-forming under the new name Electric Six and releasing its debut CD, “Fire,” in 2003.
That CD made a splash in the United Kingdom, spawning a pair of top five hits (“Gay Bar” and “Danger! High Voltage”) and going gold.
It was after the success of “Fire” that Electric Six went through some significant changes. The group lost its record deal with XL Recordings, and the original lineup of the group fell apart.
When the band finally resurfaced in 2005 with the CD “Senor Smoke,” it was on a new label, Metropolis Records, and with a new lineup that had Valentine (Tyler Spencer) and drummer M (Cory Martin) as the only original members. The revamped lineup also included guitarist the Colonol (Zach Shipps), guitarist Johnny Na$hinal (John Nash), keyboardist Tait Nucleus? (Christopher Tait), bassist/guitarist John R. Dequindre (Chris Peters) and bassist Frank Lloyd Bonaventure (Mark Dundon).
Since then, it’s been pretty smooth sailing for Electric Six. There have been a couple of personnel changes, as Smorgasbord! (Keith Thompson) and Percussion World (Mike Alonso) are now the bassist and drummer respectively, but the band has stayed on its schedule of releasing a studio CD every year and doing a considerable amount of touring.
Valentine, who remains the group’s chief songwriter, said Electric Six is able to maintain its prolific pace of releasing new music simply because it has several band members who have shown they can also contribute songs.
“John wrote the music for ‘Table and Chairs.’  Keith wrote the music for ‘After Hours’ and ‘Countdown,’” Valentine said. “So doing the math, if each person in the band writes two songs, then that’s an album. It’s not hard to do that.”
And as the catalog has deepened, the band has learned it doesn’t need to be precious about each new CD.
“It’s really good having as many albums as we do,” he said. “People are more open to doing things, and albums become less and less life and death because we’ve had so many and you see that when you’re making your first album or your second album, people think that’s how they’re going to be represented for the next 10 years is based on that album and they obsess about it.”
The band’s relaxed attitude seems to carry over to its tours, as the band members have learned how to co-exist for long stretches on the road.
“Our tours are so long that usually you start to see mental breakdowns around week five,” Valentine said. “We have a couple of finicky eaters in the band, and that becomes a real big issue. Everything has to be just so. You start to see that later into the tour, where people clearly don’t want to be on tour anymore. But yeah, they’re not bad problems. Cocaine is a bad problem. Dietary finickiness, you can deal with that.”