Electric Six

• Genre: Dance Rock
• Hometown: Detroit

About

Electric Six are six (duh) people from near Detroit . But those people have changed constantly since the sextet's late '90s days as the Wildbunch; flamboyantly manly singer and side-splittingly showy songwriter Dick Valentine has been the sole constant. Among nonconstants, sillier monikers have included the Rock and Roll Indian, Dr. Diet Mountain Dew, Smorgasbord!, M. and Percussion World (appropriately, a drummer). The band's music is just as funny, but though they've averaged about one album a year since 2003, only their debut Fire -- which includes the top-five Brit hits "Danger! High Voltage" and " Gay Bar ," both inconclusively rumored to contain backing vocals by Jack White -- made much of a mass-cultural dent. It's a shame, because the albums since -- from 2005's Senor Smoke, featuring a wacky remake of Queen's "Radio Ga Ga," to 2008's wrongly slept-on Flashy -- have been consistent in their straight-faced but smirking re-imagining of mirror-balled early '80s AOR. No band has ever so expertly fused Falco with Foreigner. That the Six's recent releases have appeared on the sleaze-embracing industrial label Metropolis is somewhat hilarious in its own right.

- Chuck Eddy