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So, Monday night I hit the Electric Six show at the High Noon Saloon. I would have talked about this yesterday but I was still recovering. Okay. I was doing yardwork on an unseasonably nice day (60 degrees in Wisconsin! Bust out the tube tops!) but pretend I am a hardcore nightlifer instead of someone who drinks tea out of a craft fair teapot.

Madison staples Screamin’ Cyn Cyn & the Pons and Butt Funnel opened. People are fond of bitching about Madison’s “music scene” being dominated by “joke bands,” and I suppose these two are archetypical of what that brand of douchesnob is talking about (I don’t really know though because I don’t belong to or really circulate within Madison’s “music scene,” such as it is): Screamin’ Cyn Cyn is a sort of performance-punk outfit whose glammed-out frontman is all about strutting his enviable skill at slinking around in impossibly high heels and Butt Funnel is a giant 7-piece ensemble of fake German accents, faker mullets, velour pants and keytars. Both groups put on a hell of a show, though, and there’s actually music happening underneath — decent music — so I’m not sure what’s going on there. Do mild cross-dressing and/or giant inflatable penises nullify your ability to hear honest, funny lyrics or danceable, Talking Heads-y musics?

Interesting choices to open for Electric Six, in any case, since I’ve frequently read about Electric Six themselves being written off as a joke band for their weird videos and gimmicky lyrics. After Cyn Cyn and Butt Funnel, though, Dick Valentine’s pinstriped, sociopath politician stage persona seemed like a bit of a straightman. In fact I had to just go watch the Body Shot video again just now to restore them to their previously-held place of special weirdness in my heart (do not try this at work).

E6 is not a joke band, though; they are a wall of sound densely built around the unshatterable foundation of Dick Valentine’s creepy, versatile voice. Their songs are almost as reliant on synth, though, so when they appeared on stage Monday and announced they were short Tait Nucleus?, their synthesizer guy, there was a collective sagging.

And then, just to show us all, the band opened with fucking Synthesizer.

I have no idea where Tait Nucleus? actually was; Valentine unflinchingly strung together a Wisconsin-relevant line of bullshit about a deer biting him on the forehead and infecting him with near-terminal Lyme Disease but my money’s on unstirrably passed out in the back; regardless, they (by which I mean the group’s dual guitarists) covered for him astonishingly well. As an aside, Johnny Na$hinal is a goddamn guitar hero; I noticed at one point he’d lost his first string and had been undetectably playing with 5 for God knows how long; he did another 3ish songs like that before finally switching instruments. I don’t think anyone remembered E6 having a synthesizer after awhile, except in a few notable cases (missing sax on Danger! High Voltage, no wandering piano to back Dick’s SASE break in I Buy the Drugs, etc.).

They did not disappoint, especially for a $12 cover.

I wonder if Madison disappointed them, though? People went absolutely crazy for the old songs: you couldn’t even hear the actual vocals during Gay Bar because the jumping/singing/screaming was too intense. But when they immediately followed it up with Gay Bar Part 2, off the much-later Flashy, Valentine sang:

And the congregation of the prayer begins to sing
They were sick delinquents joining the queue
Of the soft steaming shits demanding….

and then waited for the audience to respond

Gay Bar Part 2!

and they just didn’t. Awkward.

No one knows the Flashy and Kill stuff yet (except for me and a handful of scary zealots at the show), apparently. I understand not having listened to Kill 800 times already (although it’s probably their best album since Señor Smoke), since it really hasn’t even been out all that long, but Flashy seems to have escaped notice altogether.

That’s Electric Six, though; they’ve never made any concessions toward mainstream-friendly music or videos, and as far as I can tell they’re largely reliant on the internet to let people know they exist.

Hey, that’s what we’re here for, Detroit. Thanks for coming out.