The music of this local synth/live drum trio relays a beautiful and all too absent duality in “electronic” music. The combination of simple melody hooks along with dense textures of effects makes for music that is at the same time accessible and musically ambitious.

The inclusion of live drums instead of sampled or machined beats gives the tunes a sense of the organic which connects the listener in a way that a lot of solely programmed music cannot hope to. No matter how on tempo a drummer may be and no matter what effects he may be using, the human ear can always decipher between the real and the counterfeit.

It is this inborn and almost always subconscious lie detector that prohibits many people from enjoying a large swath of electronic music. But in the case of Electrical Spectacle it is the drumming that is the literal and figurative heartbeat of the music. The air tight poly rhythms of drummer Louis Romanos subconsciously pull the listener into the middle of the funky crossfire of blips, beeps and theremin squawks while simultaneously keeping the listener from getting left out in Moog Siberia. The Spectacle does not however totally abandon its genre’s love of drum machines.

They do appear on the record but more as accents to the theses of Romanos’ live beats. With enough hummable melodies for a jingle writers convention, the songwriting on the record is also a strength and yet another way in which the band sets themselves apart from other electronic acts. These are carefully composed tunes, each with defined movements that border on the symphonic in feel and ideation. But don’t let the headiness of the musical ideas expressed here fool you.

This record is most definitely a head bobber and as keyboardist Mike Mayfield has been heard to utter during live gigs: “Come on people, this is dance music!”