Because, like every other rock band, Electric Six sings about sex and drugs, but they just don't have any pretense of hiding it.
And the nice thing about dispensing with that pretense is that you can be honest about topics like, for instance, venereal disease. You can break out the overtly sleazy, porny menacing synthesizer--an instrument upon which Electric Six has a long history of tripping--and the whip sound effect. You can go "Increase the power (increase it!) / To a higher level," with such relish that I might have laughed out loud every single time I've listened to this song. You can say "I gave you my heart, I gave you my soul / Now I'm just another number at the Centers for Disease Control."Every time I watch Slap Shot I laugh, obviously, but I also marvel at the idea that someone was sufficiently demented to revel in the purely absurd and disgusting. Like, many of Slap Shot's gags were based on true stories, but one woman, Nancy Dowd, actually sat down and wrote it all out into one story, and I wonder what such a person must be like in real life.
Electric Six is like that. It's a band that's threatened to start a nuclear war at the Gay Bar. It's put light bulbs in the crotch of a stuffed moose. It's held forth on cannibalism. It lovingly constructed a superb cover of Queen's "Radio Ga Ga," then spent the music video for that song literally dancing on Freddie Mercury's grave. Because humor is based on surprise, Electric Six is funny because it's shocking, but it also gets away with being shocking because it's so funny.
Which is to take nothing away from how good these songs actually are, "Infected Girls" in particular. "I'm just a statue in the garden where your evil flowers grow" is a line that's not only beautiful and poetic, but it works on several levels in the context of the song. And the climbing upbeat guitar part in the prechorus is like getting a cold cocktail tossed in your face.
Being unapologetically raunchy opens up opportunities, but it also adds pressure to deliver the goods. Which Electric Six does.
