Electric Six attempts to extricate old sound

Detroit rock band Electric Six’s new album is disappointingly unremarkable — a muffled echo of the group’s glory days.

The band, formed in 2000, has made a name for itself in the last decade with diversely styled dance rock that oscillates between embracing and mocking the hyper-masculine party culture of modern American men.

Shameless dudes · Though Heartbeats and Brainwaves features an assortment of somewhat engaging tracks, the album as a whole is riddled with poorly crafted songwriting and mutedly phallocentric motifs. - Photo courtesy of Reybee Productions

Songs like “Danger! High Voltage” and “Body Shot,” on one hand, glorify primal dance floor scenes of fearless sexuality. In contrast, “Gay Bar,” with almost 20 million hits on YouTube, greatly differs from Electric Six’s more popular songs by gleefully lambasting male sexual insecurities by blending manly vocals with nonsensically homoerotic lyrics. Its message is that concertedly manly men are really just overcompensating.

So, if you love Electric Six, you are one of two things: a hipster-literate cynic who sneers at stereotypical frat bros, or a stereotypical frat bro. But by catering to each of these rivaling demographics, the band offers little substance to either. And so its catalog, while sometimes addictive, largely lacks in lyrical heft.

Heartbeats and Brainwaves’ opener “Psychic Visions” seemingly constitutes an admission of wrongdoing. At one point in the track, frontman Dick Valentine sings I’m the king of the submarines / making terrible music for teens. This is surprising for a band that once reveled in dumbness. Electric Six is older now, and evidently getting tired of the testosterone rock trimmings that long underpinned its popularity.

In Heartbeats and Brainwaves, Electric Six tries to extricate itself, but also can’t quite pull itself away, from the now-worn unabashed manliness of its early days. What results is an unfortunate compromise, a muted-sounding rendition of its older dumb-but-fun style that is at best unevenly enjoyable.

Take, for example, the second track, “French Bacon.” This tells a tragic story of two people, the narrator and a nameless girl, who are tangled in a contradictory relationship: a painful attachment they both need. Valentine croons, I’m never good at saying the right things / sometimes I say too much / sometimes I feel like a puppet with no strings / desperate and dying for your touch.

But this potentially interesting love song is so drenched in the mandatory manly non sequiturs it utterly fails to tell a cohesive story. Instead, it adds up to a muddled montage of imagery. And the song’s chorus, though catchy, certainly doesn’t approach the greatness of earlier Electric Six earworms.

That seems to be a trend in this album. Heartbeats and Brainwaves was written in an unusual way — Dick Valentine asked each of Electric Six’s members to write at least two songs. Some triple-dipped, which resulted in a 14-track final product. Normally this would lead to a lack of overall artistic cohesion, even though one might expect each band member’s contribution to be especially dense with inspiration.

Alas, nothing here will find a home in your next party’s playlist. Say what you will about “Gay Bar,” but it did rock the Internet for years with its catchy melody and proudly stupid lyrics. Heartbeats and Brainwaves lacks addictive songwriting, and needs a song that can stand out amid the unending online hurricane of new music.

Some of the album’s songs succeed more than others. “Gridlock” enters Franz Ferdinand territory with interesting results, painting a painful picture of an apprehensive dance-floor hook-up. “Intergalactic Version” achieves a big ethereal sound, complete with gospel-esque “whoa-oh” backup incantations. And “Free Samples,” an anthem literally for people giving out free samples, is so massively idiotic that if you don’t get frustrated with it, it might just get a chuckle out of you.

But these occasional winners are only moderately interesting. They don’t make up for an album full of bad songwriting. With Heartbeats and Brainwaves, Electric Six has graduated from the unashamedly phallocentric to the mutedly phallocentric, and that, as it turns out, is no improvement.

In its next attempt, Electric Six will have to either return to that old oafish manliness or finally slough it off.