Published May 8, 2009
Flashy is, frankly, anything but. After four albums of rollicking, spectacular cock-rock that have gone sadly unnoticed, Electric Six’s fifth studio LP in six years is little more than a slightly sexed-up lumpy slab of rock. It is almost totally devoid of the irreverent fun of 2003’s Fire, the shocking power of 2005’s Senor Smoke, the sophisticated cool of 2006’s Switzerland or the inventive variety of 2007’s I Shall Exterminate Everything Around Me That Restricts Me From Being The Master. Flashy plods uncertainly through its 45 minutes, desperately trying to be all the other albums at once, but it just plain old isn’t up to it.
Part of the reason for this ham-handedness may be that front man Tyler Spencer is credited with all the tracks on the album save two. This is a step backwards, as writing responsibilities had been shifting steadily to the band as a whole on the previous albums.
To be fair, there is fun to be had here. A bad Electric Six album is still a killer album, and anyone with a modicum of sense will at least be mildly entertained. That said, judging by the fact that Senor Smoke, easily their best record and possibly the best album of all time, was critically panned and ridiculed, no-one is going to care much about this, a decidedly mediocre offering from the Detroit sextet.
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