Electric Six (as The Wildbunch) | 'I Know Karate' (1996) 🥋⚡
One of my favourite bits of Electric Six pre-history.
'I Know Karate' dates all the way back to 1996 and captures that earliest Wildbunch incarnation beautifully.
It was originally released as a 7-inch, later resurfaced on Sexy Trash, and eventually received a wider official reissue on the expanded edition of Fire in 2025.
I really enjoy how raw it sounds compared with what Electric Six would eventually become. There is very little of the polished disco-rock sheen of the later records. Instead it is basically two and a half minutes of distorted guitars, a pounding rhythm section and Dick Valentine delivering increasingly absurd macho threats with complete conviction.
The lyrics are marvellously stupid in the best possible way. He builds himself up as this unstoppable action-movie character, only for one of his great qualifications to be the fact that he knows karate 😂
Even this early, you can already hear the ingredients that would become quintessential Electric Six: Repetition, swagger, danceable rhythms, cartoonish sexual menace and that peculiar ability to sound simultaneously ridiculous and completely committed to the bit.
Dick Valentine has actually singled out 'I Know Karate' when talking about how dramatically his songwriting changed over the years, describing those early Wildbunch lyrics as much simpler and more repetitive than what he would later write.
I also love hearing how much more straight-up garage rock there is in these early recordings. The Wildbunch were part of that late '90s Detroit scene around the Gold Dollar, but even then they never fit neatly into one box because the disco instincts and pop-culture silliness were already creeping in.
That's probably what makes this track so much fun now. It sounds unmistakably like the band before they had fully become Electric Six, while somehow also sounding exactly like them.
Primitive, cocky and completely absurd. As it should be 😋