From the Chocolate and Cheese-y cover of their punningly-titled debut Blew It Again to the confetti, glitter, and good times of their YouTubed performance footage, Electric Tickle Machine bears most of the markings of a gimmicky joke band. After all, we’ve all been to that show where we saw the crazy band with people in animal costumes dry-humping on stage as a Mike Tyson impersonator shoots fake blood from a Super Soaker all over the audience and the band plays inside a fireworks-spewing van on stage. You have such an awesome time that you buy their CD-R. But when you play it by yourself at home, it just kinda lays there all sad and flat without all the performative doodads and whatsits to distract you from how uninteresting the music is on its own.
Well, I haven’t seen ETM live so I can’t compare, but their music holds up pretty well on its own darn self. Their band name originally made me have visions of Rosie O’Donnell’s army of vibrating Elmos covering the ’60s nugget “Talk Talk” and, honestly, that’s not far off from what they actually offer here: loose, but not-too-sloppy garage psych rock that gets stuck in your head and then gets out of the way in easily digestible two-to-three minute chunks. The song they perform in the YouTube embed and that we’re putting here, “Part of Me,” is the rare cup of Sunny Delight that doesn’t taste like vomit. It’s the type of thing a time-warping Tullycraft would play in 1966 San Fran before the brown acid took hold and bummed out the rest of their set; or maybe it just sounds like the kind of shiny happy indie pop track that the Pete Westerberg-looking motherfucker from Polaris would bust out from time to time on Nickelodeon’s ’90s classic, The Adventures of Pete and Pete. Either way, I dig what they are putting out there without having personally witnessed the rigmarole of their live show, so go ahead and check it out for yourself.
Electric Tickle Machine, “Part of Me” (Blew It Again LP, Self-Released, 2009)
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Words: Matt Kruglinski