What’s Your Sign?

Your favorite zany six piece rock band is back with a new album called Zodiac. They bring all of their usual animated antics and milk-squirting-out-your-nose lyrics to the table with an eclectic style of songs.

With a rockin’ piano melody and heavy guitar rift, Zodiac begins with “After Hours,” a catchy stadium rock song. The album is chock full of similar catchy tunes, like “Clusterfuck!,” which includes original guitar and synth synergy. The lyrical content ranges from politically charged on “Doom and Gloom and Doom and Gloom” (“And we’ll visit Saint Joe Biden’s tomb/And the eternal sands of time will run their course/Just like a headless horseman without a horse”), which also contains a noteworthy saxophone solo, to the just plain goofy lyrics on “American Cheese” (“But I know it’d be better with gouda or cheddar!”). A cover of the long anticipated “Rubberband Man,” which the band often performs at live shows, is well executed on Zodiac.

Making heavy use of clever alliteration and couplet rhyme schemes, Dick Valentine demonstrates his range on Zodiac, delivering songs a wide array of styles. Although the album sounds like a genre-blurring grab bag full of Electric Six’s eclectic history, notably missing are the dance songs that used to make up their foundation. Fans will immediately notice the new territory being tested here, but for the average listener there is nothing really standout or noteworthy about this album.