I’ll never forget my first Electric Six concert, the night Larry King died.  After two forgettable opening acts, Dick Valentine emerged in a cape and announced that the talk show host (still certainly alive today) was dead.  With no cell reception in the sweaty basement venue, Larry King was dead for the next two hours.

That’s Valentine’s twisted talent: the ability to fabricate an absurd, sometimes distasteful pocket of ad-hoc reality – for a concert, or just a song – that is completely compelling even as it is absolutely ridiculous.  It’s the animating spirit that made Fire the blinding, effortless rock success it remains, a spirit and skill still in evidence in Zodiac.  It’s not always enough, but like much of their recent work, it improves on multiple listens.

As if operating on the (reasonable!) assumption that their debut album was the result of talent, blind luck, and directionless gumption, they have spent the last six records seeking to re-bottle Fire‘s lightning by throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks.  The answer is: not everything.  “American Cheese” is a brassy home-run, but “It Ain’t Punk Rock” feels half-hearted even for them.  “I am a Song” has classic potential, and “Love Song for Myself” would be even better without the last minute and a half of atonal cat noises.  The guitars really shine in the sensitive honesty of “Tables and Chairs” (with a characteristic empty postmodernism), probably the album’s high point – but you may come to dread the upbeat Lynchian nightmare of “Talking Turkey.”

E6 is getting predictable.  There’s always the one with a timely political reference, the one where he’s sexually humiliated, the one where he thinks he’s the devil (?!), the one with the lady backup singers.  Given Valentine’s earnest disregard for the content of his songs, they could easily descend into ironic mannerism.  But something sincere remains at the core of their music: they really mean their gibberish (you don’t go to the effort of rhyming “polyurethane” if you don’t care), and their music, infectiously dancey and guitar-driven, drips with the gooey residue of oracular insight.  “Because you only get one shot/I took my shot and missed,” Valentine growls in “Talking Turkey;” Zodiac may be as much miss as hit, but it’s good to know that they’ll almost certainly take another shot very soon.

You can hear Zodiac at Electric Six’s myspace.