With monikers such as The Colonel, Tait Nucleus?, and Smorgasbord!, and a catalog that includes an album called I Shall Exterminate Everything Around Me That Restricts Me From Being the Master, the Detroit-based sextet Electric Six is often mistaken for a novelty act parodying the aggressive sexuality of disco and arrogant posturing of rock and roll.

But the band’s frontman, Dick Valentine, chafes at the suggestion that the Electric Six are anything short of straight-faced. “Cynical, yes, but not satirical,” says Valentine, whose real name is Tyler Spencer, in a phone interview with Washington City Paper. “Novelty is something that you premeditate, and you’re doing something that you wouldn’t normally do because you want to call attention to yourself or you want to sell more records. And with this band, it’s always been my path of least resistance—it’s just that these songs come naturally… I don’t think we’re trying to make a statement about other types of music in that way.”

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Last night’s show at The Black Cat featured heavy dance rock from two bands: one that was amusing for all the wrong reasons, and one that was amusing for all the right ones.

I had never listened to Living Things before this show, so I was not certain what I was in for. “Living Things”: I imagined ungodly quasi-mammals, throbbing and pink and slightly demented. (Like The Hills Have Eyes, or Frankenstein’s Monster–“It’s Aliiiiive!” That sort of thing.) Their set started off unremarkably: heavy distortion, thunderous drum fills, a lead singer with a voice just baritone enough as to be incomprehensible beneath the merciless flogging of power chords. But once the tech crew tweaked the mixing board enough that Lillian Berlin’s lyrics began to break through the wall of sound, I began to understand.

Read More “Nuclear War on The Dance Floor: Living Things and Electric Six” »

Electric Six is the type of band that illustrates the exceptional relationship between irony and music. Sporting names like Dick Valentine, Tait Nucleus?, The Colonel, and Smorgasbord, the band is basically the Spinal Tap of new wave metal, except that they’re for real–sort of. As for-real as you can get while having an album titled I Shall Exterminate Everything Around Me That Restricts Me From Being the Master.

Striving to project, as outrageously as possible, quintessence of narcissistic, hyper-masculine god-rocking, the band has managed to live the dream: It hit the top charts in the U.K. for singles “Danger! High Voltage!,” “Gay Bar,” “The Dance Commander,” and the album Fire–proving that in music (especially new-wave metal), parody can be just as successful as the stuff it caricatures, and for the same reasons: showmanship, dancability, and face-meltitude.

ELECTRIC SIX w/ LIVING THINGS, THE BLACK CAT, 1811 14th St. NW, 8 p.m., $15