Although not exactly your reviewer's cup of poisoned snakebite as a rule, Japan's ELECTRIC EEL SHOCK certainly kick up a mighty rock thunder with the irrepressible "Beat Me."
Ridiculously OTT opener "Scream For Me" gives you some idea of what to expect. The drums sound like the most lunkheaded combination of The Sweet's "Blockbuster" and Iron Maiden's "Running Free" imaginable; the riffs are straight outta Black Sabbath's "Master Of Reality"; the lead breaks clone Thin Lizzy and 'singer' Aki screeches like wet cement's being tipped unceremoniously down his throat. Which, on balance, is often liable to be a good thing.
The end result is utterly OTT and spills over gloriously into "Spinal Tap" territory, but hey, everyone's entitled to the odd "Hello Cleveland" moment in their life, right? And when it's this much fun we can surely forgive them. Especially when the ensuing song (the charmingly-titled "Bastard!") is such an infectiously funky affair.
And, regardless of this writer's usual aversion to too much of this kind of thing, he has to admit a goodly amount of this - surprisingly diverse - album is capable of winning him over. Indeed, EES prove themselves pretty adept musically, veering from the groovy strut of the Hendrixian "Lemon Lees" to the hooky, MC5 riffin'n'testifyin' of "Rock'n'Roll Kills The Blues" and the madcap anthem that is the immortally-titled "I Love Fish, But Fish Hate Me."
Admittedly, their obvious love of classic heavy rock can sometimes grate unpleasantly. "Killer Killer"s dark, sticky web of intrigue gradually becomes unstuck as you become enveloped in the grinding heaviosity; "Slow Down"'s Jimmy Page-style overload is a good few degrees too widdly for comfort and "I Can Hear The Sex Noise" is simply lumpen.
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All is not lost, though, as EES still have tracks like "Mile End" and "Don't Say Fuck" in reserve. It's hard to imagine anything as absurd as the primordial Glam beat and caveman riffing of the former (not to mention its' apparent Cockney Rejects homage of a chorus)possibly working, by by God it does. "Don't Say Fuck", meanwhile, is a Discharge-bottle-Blue Cheer power surge which would surely connect like a demolition ball with a condemned house when it's played live, and the closing double-speed cover of Black Sabbath's "Iron Man"....well, suffice it to say they escape with cheek to spare and their limbs intact.
Electric Eel Shock, then, are a superficially daft, but actually surprisingly toothsome preadator lurking in rock's deeper trenches. On the basis of "Beat Me" it seems unlikely they will break the commercial surface too often, but I still wouldn't recommend carelessly dangling your arms in the water if they're in the vicinity.
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