The Real Reason Vampires Die

Electric Six “After Hours”

The world of Electric Six is tasteless and full of preening, anxious douchebags. It’s sad and desperate and vulgar and dumb. It’s basically the culture that we are trying to escape when we embrace things like indie rock. “After Hours,” the opening number on the band’s seventh album, sounds like the theme song to an expensive, ultra-tacky Meatpacking District bar full of all those mysterious affluent people moving into all those new luxury high-rises. It’s a bad scene. The music has a frightened urgency; Dick Valentine spits out his lines with maximum venom, his voice whipping you at the end of every line — HOURS, HOURS! FIRED, FIRED! He sounds bitter and disgusted, resigned to being trapped in this stupid, stupid hell. It’s meant to be funny in a grim sort of way, but it’s getting to the point that Valentine’s deadpan satire is starting to just come across like realism. What is even exaggerated anymore? You scrape away the humorous hyperbole and the ironic distance, and it’s a scathing indictment of idiocy and excess: “That’s how organs shut down and brain cells DIE.”

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