{"id":351,"date":"2015-06-20T18:00:54","date_gmt":"2015-06-20T16:00:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/greywolfe.co.za\/blog\/?p=351"},"modified":"2015-06-20T18:14:51","modified_gmt":"2015-06-20T16:14:51","slug":"human-zoo-review-little-experiments-that-go-a-long-way","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/greywolfe.co.za\/blog\/human-zoo-review-little-experiments-that-go-a-long-way\/","title":{"rendered":"Human Zoo Review: Little Experiments That Go A Long Way"},"content":{"rendered":"

No game this week, sorry. Any gaming I would have done got subsumed by E3. And by the time E3 was done, I was just too wrapped up in other things to pick up from where I left off. Like Tavern Brawls. My God. So absurd. But we\u2019ll wrap around to Tavern Brawls [in Hearthstone] once there are more of those.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a>
Human Zoo’s front cover – this trippiness is exactly right for Electric Six<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This isn\u2019t the first Electric Six album. In fact, for a few years, there, Electric Six had been putting out roughly an album a year. They took a break, and started up again somewhere in 2012 and this particular album is their latest.<\/p>\n

If you\u2019ve never listened to an Electric Six album, the important thing to understand is that the lyrics of the songs generally make absurdist sense. That is, sometimes, there\u2019s a narrative that you can piece together, and sometimes, this means that the song actually does \u201cmean something\u201d but it can veer wildly from \u201cYou\u2019re flying on Lucifer Airlines, relax and enjoy the flight into Hell\u201d to songs about \u201cnot really being the life of the party, but trying anyway.\u201d<\/p>\n

The second important thing to understand about Electric Six is that they are ridiculously<\/em> good at making music. On Zodiac [a few albums ago] they somehow ran a bastardized \u201cBaker Street\u201d into a near-impression of \u201cThe Great Gig In The Sky.\u201d These little nuggets were to be found in the incredible song \u201cDoom and Gloom and Doom and Gloom.\u201d The scary thing? It all flows so well together that it\u2019s difficult to understand how Dick Valentine and company made all these logical leaps.<\/p>\n

So, here\u2019s Human Zoo. By now, you\u2019d think that they would have run out of things to write crazy lyrics about. Or might have run out of musical steam. And for some fans, that most certainly has happened. Let\u2019s be clear: Electric Six aren\u2019t really ever going to move out of the basement of crazy Party Rock that they\u2019ve been settled in since their first album. No. Instead, what\u2019s going to happen is that they\u2019re going to do little experiments on each album and those experiments will go on to inform the next album down the line.<\/p>\n

Here, they take some cues from their ode to synthesizers [\u201cHeartbeats and Brainwaves\u201d \u2013 another amazing album] and run those sensibilities into their more modern and more rock oriented output [\u201cKill,\u201d \u201cFlashy\u201d and the like.] \u2013 what this means is that there\u2019s always some kind of crunchy guitar going on in most of the songs \u2013 and on top of this, we get to hear some interesting synthesizer flourishes.<\/p>\n

This intent is made clear right from the opener, \u201cKarate Lips,\u201d with its bombastic and stompy guitar riff that has a little shimmer of keyboard strewn all along the top of the song. As far as openers go, this one sets the tone nicely for the rest of the record. Electric Six are here to rock. And they\u2019re here to do it in heavy style.<\/p>\n

There are a handful of miss-steps when experiments go awry. On paper, the idea of \u201cGun Rights\u201d must have seemed appealing: make a goofy sounding pastiche that sounds not-at-all Electric Six and dress it up in a Mexican-seeming sound scape and see what comes out, but it doesn\u2019t quite<\/em> work. There\u2019s too much repetition of the phrase \u201cyou took away my rights, my gun rights\u201d which wears thin pretty quickly \u2013 there\u2019s most certainly not enough of the spoken word mid-section, which goes some way to redeeming the song.<\/p>\n

\"Not<\/a>
Human Zoo’s surprisingly austere back cover<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The same is arguably true of \u201cI\u2019ve Seen Rio In Flames.\u201d It\u2019s not a bad song, but it\u2019s an odd choice for the middle of the record. In this sense, it\u2019s an experiment in pacing and all it does is cause the flow of the album to come to a sudden [and rather abrupt halt] mid-way through the proceedings. This is an especially bizarre experiment when given \u201cElectric Six Canon.\u201d Essentially, each disk ends in a slow, less energetic song, and sticking \u201cI\u2019ve Seen Rio In Flames\u201d at this point makes you suddenly pause and go, \u201cwait, that\u2019s it?\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 Particularly if you\u2019re an Electric Six fan and you have some idea of what to expect.<\/p>\n

But other experiments, I\u2019m pleased to say, work quite well. There\u2019s an almost-rap-inspired song in \u201c(Who The Hell Just) Call My Phone\u201d \u2013 again, much like with \u201cGun Rights\u201d it really shouldn\u2019t work. That\u2019s not the sort of band Electric Six is, but against all odds, it re-ignites the album and gets it stomping along again quite nicely after the lull of \u201cRio.\u201d<\/p>\n

These little ideas \u2013 which could have destroyed the album \u2013 make it all the more interesting and I appreciate that Electric Six are \u2013 in their own, subtle way, moving their sound forward in a slow, deliberate sort of manner.<\/p>\n

Should you buy this album? This is tricky. For a non-Electric Six fan, I think it would take a certain mindset to appreciate what\u2019s going on here. They definitely are quite talented musicians, but the lack of lyrical sense will probably push some people away. Moreover, if you\u2019re a lapsed Electric Six fan, I\u2019m not sure this is a good place to pick up again. Some songs \u2013 the highlights of the album, if you will \u2013 are very much in the style of their older music \u2013 \u201cKarate Lips,\u201d \u201cIt\u2019s Horseshit!,\u201d \u201cWorst Movie Ever,\u201d \u201cGood View Of The Violence\u201d and to a lesser extent \u201c(Who The Hell Just) Call My Phone\u201d will all make lapsed fans quite happy, but they\u2019re going to have to contend with less straightforward songs like \u201cRio\u201d and \u201cGun Rights.\u201d<\/p>\n

I think the solution is to listen to those two songs, in particular, and gauge your reaction to them and then make a purchasing decision. [of course, this being the modern era, if you\u2019re simply not into those two songs, Amazon will probably happily sell you the album sans those two pieces of music and \u2013 of course, you can always skip past them, should you buy the entire disk and they come up.]<\/p>\n

All-in-all, I think this is a stellar Electric Six release and I\u2019m curious to see what they do next.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

No game this week, sorry. Any gaming I would have done got subsumed by E3. And by the time E3 was done, I was just too wrapped up in other things to pick up from where I left off. Like Tavern Brawls. My God. So absurd. But we\u2019ll wrap around<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[11],"tags":[49,48,50,47],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/greywolfe.co.za\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/351"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/greywolfe.co.za\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/greywolfe.co.za\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/greywolfe.co.za\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/greywolfe.co.za\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=351"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/greywolfe.co.za\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/351\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":355,"href":"http:\/\/greywolfe.co.za\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/351\/revisions\/355"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/greywolfe.co.za\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=351"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/greywolfe.co.za\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=351"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/greywolfe.co.za\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=351"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}