Imagine the situation: You're in a band and you have two good songs and maybe a handful more fair to middling ones, then suddenly you become phenomenally successful and you have to play sets of an hour or more. What do you do? Play extended jams of all the worthwhile material and hope no-one notices that your set was only five songs long? A bit too Led Zeppelin for you? Well how about writing some fantastic new songs? Steady on there, don't get crazy on me! Fill the gaps in the set with amusing cover versions? Sounds more promising? Well what if we just spread the actual songs thinly across the set and then do "Gay Bar" as the encore to make sure no-one leaves early? Let's go!

To be fair to the Electric Six they do air one or two new songs and still trying to be fair they will probably grow on me but it's like trying to plug a hole in the Titanic with a piece of gum. Still on the good points they manage to rock the dangerous no-man's-land of taste that is disco-metal crossover with wit and style but again, without the songs to back it up their enthusiastic stage presence is paper-thin.

They avoid the pretensions of the encore by not even bothering to walk offstage, simply standing still, eyes to the floor and waiting in the darkness while the crowd goes though the motions of calling them back. Sure enough out comes "Gay Bar" at last, setting the notoriously wobbly Liquid Room floor shaking disconcertingly but still, as we drift on home it's hard not to feel cheated. -Ian Martin, Dec.12.03