Electric Eel Shock – Rock N Roll Monster From Japan
March 29, 2003
I’m not sure how this happened, but the best live act came to town last week and barely anyone knew about it. Electric Eel Shock may not seem like much when they show up at the club, just three Japanese guys that weigh about 100 pounds each. Other than some distinctive hair, they just don’t seem that special. By the time they’re done, everyone in the club looks like they’ve just been kicked in the brainstem repeatedly for an hour.
What happened inbetween? What happened was the single nuttiest, most energetic set and grandest display of rock and roll showmanship I’ve ever seen. EES is a very basic rock band at best, Black Sabbath filtered through the stripped and raw style of the MC5, but in the span of that hour, they will have you convinced they are the greatest band of all time.
Consider this: the members of Electric Eel Shock have a very basic grasp of the English language. They communicate with the crowd on a completely base level, yelling and jumping and throwing up devil horns. It’s almost a challenge to the audience to yell and jump and throw more devil horns. It’s a challenge that the audience always loses, of course. But in the journey, the band gets the crowd whipped into a frenzy and into lost abandon. It’s pretty rare to see people lose it like that, especially in hipster crowds where the most action you’ll see is people bob their head occasionally while they cross their arms and stare down the band, but it is almost a certainty with the Electric Eel Shock.
It’s incredibly refreshing to see other cultures filter back things like rock and roll as they don’t know the rules. As a result, they can adopt all the cliches and somehow repackage them into something that feels fresh again. There’s something beautiful about people throwing up the Universal Metal Sign without any layer of irony. Electric Eel Shock doesn’t throw their hands in the air like that to be funny or cool, they do it because they’re rocking the shit out of everything and sticking their fingers up in the air like that is the only way they can express it.
Drummer Gian Ito crushes out beats with two sticks in each hand, or sometimes just by bashing on the cymbals with his bare hands. He’ll make odd noises into his microphone, like a cat in heat, for his “backing vocals.” Bass player Kazu Maekawa stomps around on stage and leaps everywhere, including the wall in a display of trickwalking bass playing. All of this madness is fronted by Akhito Morimoto, who has gleaned every rock stance in the book, and invented a few of his own. He is the only person I’ve ever seen do solos from an exaggerated sumo stance, and the only person to use his Flying V as a jackhammer. He’s also the only person I’ve seen engaged in mortal combat with himself on stage, a rock n roll Tyler Durden that ends the set by karate chopping his instrument in its crotch, and then guillotining himself with the edge of the guitar. It’s a relentless assault on the senses. Oh, and the drummer’s naked all the time.
Video Link here. You MUST watch this!!!
Posted in From Blown Speakers
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