Review Summary: I get all my gas from advice boy
It’s as certain as the flux of seasons. It gets colder, trees start changing colour and losing their leaves, I get bogged down with the flu for a week and Electric Six drops a new record. Other aspects of their existence may be altered – a guitarist may change, the ridiculously self-deprecating lighter/bottle opener hybrids may vanish from the merchandise tables at shows, but the unchanging record drop must occur. The vigilance with which they fulfil their quest leads me to believe that Mother Nature may actually be regulating her clock around the album release, with the band being aware of the burden on their shoulders.
Another thing that doesn’t seem to be going away any time soon is the band’s restless musical evolution. Electric Six refuses to make the same album twice, usually for better than for worse. They can’t all be zingers, and Human Zoo feels like less of a zinger than some prior work. That’s not to say that the record tarnishes the band’s track record or won’t be a relevant stepping stone in their endless aural trek, as both of those sentiments are extremely far removed from truth.
For you see, Human Zoo is eclectic, precious and precocious. Possibly even a bit too much so. Previously, Electric Six would occasionally do some truly oddball and explorative stuff for a track or two (“Sexy Trash”). This record is explorative through most of its duration. The stellar opener “Karate Lips” feels 80s to the core with its slow-motion hair metal and female martial arts themed lyrics, but quickly shuffles out of the way to make room for “It’s Horse***” with its jangly, catchy melancholy. The extremely impressive one-two punch is followed by the band doing Motown (if the promotional write-up for the record is anything to go on), a throbbing drive-with-the-hood-of-your-car-down electronic workout, a bizarre song that sounds like Captain Beefheart riding a giant slug through the time-space continuum with little regards for the laws of physics, some sort of mildly demented Disney spoof… I think you get my point.
A problem is that the finest hour of the record comes when the band mostly stick to their old guns. “(Who the Hell Just) Call My Phone” manages to somehow outdo the flat-out amazing one-two punch of the record start, and is quite probably the best song Electric Six has penned to date. The deranged faux-hip-hop vocals hover over an incredibly tight, catchy band groove, which gets challenged for space by keyboard shimmers as the song progresses. A couple of sour music box notes crop up every now and then, hijacking the song at one point. The accordion rendition of the main groove really tries to bring it back on track but fails miserably and dies. Aside from Dick Valentine’s novel vocal manner, the song rarely budges from the band’s heritage, but executes it in a jaw-dropping, stellar fashion.
The aforementioned song’s unadulterated old-style awesomeness makes it more difficult to appreciate the rest of the album and its explorations. Everything else on here is quite laid back, a bit introverted and melancholic, and about as far from immediate as you could imagine. On the first few listens, the record feels like it has one good song and everything else is a scattered, pointless mess. Hang in there, it gets better – if you persevere, the tracks slowly peek out from behind the awkwardly spacious production and show off their merits. I may have mentioned gas boy to my friends a few times too many over the past couple of days. It’s quite hilarious in a way that the record is so difficult to appreciate because of how good a song on it is.
Even when the curtain is lifted, not everything is perfect. The other songs that tend to tread a bit close to home turn out to be surprisingly feeble. The pre-chorus of “Worst Movie Ever” may ooze power, but the track ends up feeling extremely forced both lyrically and musically and should have been left on the cutting room floor. “I Need a Restaurant” may lean towards Rocky Horror’esque blues-rock at times, in particular during the backing to the vocalisations, but everything it tries to do has been done better in the past. “Good View of the Violence” is the closest to redeemable from the bunch with its grunting slide, but still fails to really hit home. It’s also quite awkward how all of those are bunched up together in the second half of the record, and make “I’m the Devil” (the weakest of the exploratory songs, mind you) seem like a highlight. All of these tracks give off a B-side vibe – it’s possible that the band paid a bit too much heed to the first half and squeezed in these three half-baked bits to stuff up the run time.
So is Human Zoo the best thing the band has ever done, and their defining moment? Not really. In spirit, it reminds me a lot of their 2008 album, Flashy – Electric Six experimented with things like horns, sleazy African percussion and vocoders on there, whilst delivering a splendid toe-tapper in “Formula 409”. The newly discovered orchestration aesthetics promptly led to their two best records. This time around, the band treads far more diverse stylistic waters, whilst still miraculously holding the record together as a whole. If the past is anything to go on, the future should be amazing.
