The Wedgewood Rooms is at about half capacity on this chilly December night, but the room seems more full than it really is at the instant that the lights drop and tonight’s headline act take to the stage. Everybody feels included, because this is as much a party as it is a gig – as the band themselves make a point of telling the audience, we are all Electric Eel Shock.
Heavy metal, so its detractors will tell you, is a joke. Overblown, clichéd, a carnival of overused tropes, sounds and symbols; a dated dead genre with little or no artistic merit. Maybe they’re right.
But I’d argue they’ve just missed the punchline – or, if they heard it, they just didn’t get it. Sure, there are plenty of bands out there peddling the old ideas as if they’d never noticed Ozzy Osbourne’s decline into an addled and shambolic reality television car-crash and the sad bloating of the cock-rock era. But there are also plenty of groups who acknowledge metal’s absurdity and turn it on its head. Heavy metal can be a joke, yes. A very funny one; just ask Electric Eel Shock.
Electric Eel Shock are a Japanese trio who taught themselves English by listening to eighties metal – Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden, Rainbow, Motley Crue and more. And in a manner we have come to expect from Japanese bands, they have appropriated all the surface stylings of the genre and turned it into a form of theatre – an enthusiastic and fun-filled show that embraces the best and worst of metal, saluting it with a bottle of beer and a shit-eating grin.
Aki Morimoto is the party’s MC – a slight little guy with a big frizzy mop of hair and a much-battered Flying-V guitar. Balancing him out at stage left is Kazuto Maekawa on bass, a slightly more chunky figure who plays the comparative straight-man to Morimoto’s antics. Back at the drumkit is Gian – slightly less a legend for playing the drums with four sticks at once than he is for wearing nothing but a tube sock - Red Hot Chilli Peppers style - while doing so.
Electric Eel Shock’s music is a carnival of classic riffs from rock and metal. In the case of their own songs they’re changed around somewhat, meaning that each intro, hook or chorus is warmly familiar but still recognisably different. Gian and Maekawa lay down the bottom-end thunder while Morimoto attacks the fretboard and wrenches out power chords and overblown solos to the accompaniment of traditional axe-man gurning. The lyrics, like the music, are metal either without the pretence or with the pretence cranked up to eleven – from the self-parody of “Big Mistake” and “I Can’t Hear You” to the cartoon excess of “Limousine”, the songs are a send-up and a celebration at the same time. You’d have to be the most miserable of metal purists not to smile.
Not least because fun is infectious – and as much as the audience are having a great time, no one is having more fun than the band themselves. Grinning like loons in between the oh-so-serious metal faces, leaping around the stage like schoolkids on a serious sugar binge – it’s rare to see a band that get this much sheer joy out of playing the fool to a crowd.
But it’s not pure pastiche – while there’s more than a hint of Spinal Tap to Electric Eel Shock’s approach, there’s an undercurrent of genuine love and enthusiasm that just can’t be faked. This is the rarely-seen positive flip-side of post-modernism, perhaps – sure, classic heavy metal may have little currency as a serious cultural narrative these days, but that does nothing to diminish the fact that shouting along to the racket of a rock band with your hands in the air is a truly liberating experience, if you can just let go of your preconceptions for forty-five minutes.
And that’s the true triumph of Electric Eel Shock – they put on a show that can be equally enjoyed by metal’s fanatics and its detractors. The genre is almost irrelevant, because this is more than just a rock show – it’s a complete entertainment package. After an encore of two songs and a medley of thrift-store riffs from the greatest hits of metal, Electric Eel Shock end the show, bow to the audience, and start humbly packing up their own gear in between chatting to the enthusiastic fans still hanging over the barrier. They’re a club-venue band with the heart of a stadium rock group - and if you have any faith at all in music as a vehicle for fun, you owe it to yourself to see them play live. Kampai!
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