Review Summary: “Tragedy and tears all around, but the boy grows up to live a typical miserable British existence and Uncle Arthur is reincarnated as a falcon” – Dick Valentine, 2015
This year, the inevitable Electric Six press release foreshadowing the even more inevitable record drop was quite ominous. The theme for the year is mortality, the cover art for the year is a fantastically self-deprecating two-minutes-in-Photoshop stage curtain, and the closing track for the year is self-titled. Fortunately, the band momentarily rushed in to dement any murmurs of this being their swansong. I guess that, in a similar fashion to the universe getting enough crapshoots to pull off an Earth, the existence of Electric Six isn’t all that surprising, but the annual record drop needs to stop being taken for granted and instead be actively cherished.
Aside from mortality, another theme for the year appears to be relative minimalism. The songs are short and focused. The arrangements are compact. Keyboard flourishes are kept to a minimum, letting the guitars get a bit more room to breathe in the mix. This results in the band’s liveliest sounding record in five years, which makes for a pleasant surprise, adding to the immediacy of the release. Don’t get me wrong, this is not a major aural departure from what was going on the past few albums – if a guitar can hide behind a synth, it still will, but somehow it can still feel reasonably present and pack a decent degree of punch. Thankfully, the material featured within is sturdy and focused as well, so the rationing of left-field musical sprinkles doesn’t hurt the record as much as it could have.
Picking highlights is surprisingly challenging. Most Electric Six albums have a few immediate standout tracks, indirectly paying homage to their early hit-prone incarnation, but there’s nothing of the sort here. The song that resonates the strongest with me would be “Take Another Shape” – there’s nothing quite like a deceptive dunderheaded riff, complete with the second guitarist doing a pick slide, promptly imploding into an unexpectedly mournful tune with a fantastically restrained vocal delivery and just the right level of arrangement layering (brass-like decaying fuzz, ethereal higher range vocal overdubs) to truly drive the message home. The album makes for a very consistent start-to-finish listen, the variance on song quality is very low, and the band feels quite at ease.
In fact, the cohesiveness of the album unexpectedly lets a few choice musical nuggets slip under the rug undetected. As predicted, the band takes cues from their expansive Human Zoo roaming, and there’s a slovenly country bar rocker, complete with mildly Dadaist guitar plonking, lurking in the middle of the record. “Kids are Evil” gets to have a military-sounding whistling melody, which blends seamlessly with the rest of the track. There’s probably more hiding in there, as it takes a few goes through “Slow Motion Man” to notice the wonderfully demented music box spoof of a highly clichéd chord progression, or the (literally) roaring backing vocals of “When Cowboys File for Divorce”.
There are times when the compactness and cohesiveness of the record work against it, but they’re few and far in between. “Big Red Arthur” comes to mind – the song is very sturdy, with the Lancashire urban myth inspired lyrics showing what a wordsmith of Dick Valentine’s calibre can pull off if actually given a subject matter, but the forcibly minimal arrangement of parts of the track leaves the pre-choruses and choruses wanting an extra layer or two to let the song spread its wings to the fullest. Plus, truthfully, a properly catchy track or two wouldn’t have hurt. This record is no Human Zoo, which probably needed “(Who the Hell Just) Call my Phone” and the other earworms to stay afloat, but it’s also no Zodiac – Electric Six’s magnum opus, which got away with a similar standout-free cohesiveness because of how incredibly high the standard was. Dick Valentine’s 2015 acoustic record, which came out a few months ahead of this, had at least five songs that could have fulfilled this role just fine – why were none of them on here?
Lack of earworms aside, Bitch! Don’t Let Me Die is a sturdy record that fits right into the back catalogue of what is probably the most consistent rock band active. The increased liveliness of the sound and focused material make this an easy, immediately accessible listen that leaves decidedly Electric Six’ish room to grow through bits and pieces like “Roulette!”s delightful space jazz outro or the incessant fretboard toasting of “When Cowboys File for Divorce”. Take it out for a spin and appreciate the freakish twist of circumstance that let this all happen. Here’s to many more.
