Concert Review: Electric Six, Local H, Child Bite @ St. Andrew’s Hall

Hey kids, dust off your old comic book 3D glasses, because today’s special Electric Six show recap features photos from artist Chris Dean’s ‘Live From Detroit’ series. These are ‘analglyphs’, which means you’ll need those red and blue 3D glasses. More ‘lenticular’ style images will be shown along with shots of 20+ other bands in an exhibition in summer 2009, but for now, get your glasses ready, and prepare to relive E6… in three dimensions…

If you’ve never seen Child Bite before, this visual description might help describe their sound: most of their members have the frazzled look of the Saddam Hussein that we dug out of that hole in Iraq, and their instruments include a saxophone and computer game joystick. ‘Spastic’ is the first word that comes to mind. Set ended with the guitarist giving his instrument to an unsuspecting girl in the audience to play while the singer donned a t shirt ninja mask and jumped from the balcony.

Next up was Chicago two-piece Local H, who brought in a sizable chunk of the audience nostalgic for their 90′s grunge-reared punk. The two played a punishing set, and reminded everyone that you can still make catchy, even danceable songs with three chords and the knobs turned to 11.

Electric Six took the stage in a manner that suited their musical bravado, with singer Dick Valentine clad in a sequined red cape that had “Flashy” written on it, later taking it off to reveal another cape that said “Showtime” as the band played songs of the same names.

A catalog-spanning set followed, the Six for the most part skimming for their hits, with Local H and Child Bite‘s sax player joined the band onstage to provide additional instrumentation. For as much of E6′s songs (and their charm) can be written off as gleeful studio-screwing, songs like “Dance Commander”, “Gay Bar”, “I Buy The Drugs”, and “Danger! High Voltage!” are as funny as they are great songs (though “Feed My Fuckin Habit”, the essential E6 song in my opinion, was sorely missed).

Between-song banter proved to be equally humorous, such as when the band used ‘Stephen Hawking technology’ to to send us back to 2005 so that they could play the hopefully no longer topical “Rock And Roll Evacuation”. Despite rock-royalty posturing, in the end Electric Six persists because they just want to have fun, and the band manage to deflect one-hit wonder status, in tandem with constant touring, by making songs the frat pack can pound some Jägerbombs to.

Photos by Chris Dean