Electric Callboy are in many ways the very acme of a contemporary metal band; or maybe to put it another way, they have become that very acme.
Their first decade was not perhaps as distinctive as their current incarnation, which may have something to do with the arrival of their new vocalist Nico Sallach in 2020. We shy away from describing him as a frontman, for the simple reason that much of the Callboy’s schtick is characterised by the interaction between the two vocalists, Kevin Ratajczak and the newcomer Sallach.
As well as providing a focus for stage and video antics, these two also act as spokesmen for the band in social media interactions, which have included a bid for the Eurovision Song Contest and a change to the band name to counter issues of cultural insensitivity. For many earlier generations of metallers, the latter of these might have been addressed by doubling-down on the issue to avoid being labelled as snowflakes, but as we have already observed: Electric Callboy are in many ways the very acme of a contemporary metal band.
The chameleon-like genre-bending follows these bangers as a convoluted thread: “Pump It” and “We Got The Moves” flirt the with ’80s pop stylings that were so central to their rollerdisco metal hit “Hypa Hypa”; but not content to rest on their laurels, there are collaborations with other artists: the rapper FiNCH on “Spaceman”, who brings the band firmly into rave metal, and Conquer Divide on “Fuckboi”, which recalls Motörhead‘s pairings with Girlschool, albeit in a more emo manner, and with one of the best punchlines in recent pop music.
And punchlines are a key to the Electric Callboy phenomenon, much of their act is clearly comical, from the mullets and moustaches to the bantzy social media personae. The most recent of their hits, “Hurrikan”, opens as an unashamed schlager number before going… well, I won’t ruin it with spoilers, but that there can even be spoilers and that it rises to a conceptual punchline is part and parcel of the method.
Tekkno is solidly front-loaded with the four most familiar bangers, with “Hurrikan” shoring up what would once have been side-B. The remainder of the material is what the title would lead you to expect, “Tekkno Train” in particular. This is the unashamed embracing of dance technology into metal, and as Ratajczak reminds us on “Spaceman”: their religion is rave. So the problem is the same as that of the k-pop album: there is a whole stack of excellent material, but the classic sense of an album is absent.
Is that even a problem for listeners who aren’t tremendously old though?
And with their unresting penchant for experimentation, their good ethical choices, and their goofy sense of humour, we look forward to their next raft of transformations.
-Iotar-
