If you’re thinking to yourself, “Jesus Christ, not these fucking assholes again,” nobody would blame you. After all this is E6’s 12th album in as many years, and let’s face it, we don’t really even need 12 Electric Six albums in a lifetime. However, as the title suggests, this one attempts to meander far enough away from the Detroit band’s standard dance-punk formula to feel like something new and fresh.
That doesn’t mean you’re going to like it, of course, it just means it sounds different. How different? Like Grandmaster Flash trading Casio licks with the Thompson Twins different.
You’ve gotta hand it to the Six, they went all in on this funky new wave retro bullshit trip of theirs, and if you don’t miss the stabby hard-rock riffs of their Gay Bar days, Vampyres has plenty of pleasantly goofy soda-pop-sipping hits on deck, from the breakdancey Number Of The Beast to the audaciously phony R&B of Mood Is Improving to the yard-sale-synth Prince-isms of Dance With Dark Forces. This might already seem like a bad idea, but it works in short spurts.
