Electric Six's raison d'etre has always been getting the party started and throwing it into high gear, and sometimes the way to do that is to play some songs everyone already knows and can howl along with. 2021's Streets of Gold is E6's first album in three years (an unprecedented break from recording, presumably imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic), and this time out they've recorded an entire set of covers, along with remakes of two E6 hits ("Danger! High Voltage" and "Gay Bar"). If the Electric Six had to make a living as a bar band playing other people's hits, Streets of Gold shows they could probably make a go of it -- the arrangements follow the originals fairly closely while still showing some of their own personality (and one thing this band has never lacked is personality), and they can generate a good beat you can dance to. They've also chosen a good set of songs -- while most of these numbers should be reasonably familiar, pulling Tin Machine's "Under the God" out of the bag is a gutsy move that works, and raiding the songbooks of Roky Erickson ("Click Your Fingers Applauding the Play"), Love ("Maybe the People Would Be the Times or Between Clark and Hilldale"), and James Ingram ("Yah Mo B There") shows they're willing to entertain the deep cuts fans along with the folks who prefer to hear INXS ("Don't Change"), Fleetwood Mac ("Little Lies"), and Alice Cooper ("No More Mr. Nice Guy," which sounds pretty much perfect for Dick Valentine's voice and persona). However, the pure mania that is E6's trademark is in curiously short supply -- they have no trouble tearing up their own numbers, but they sound oddly subdued here, seemingly afraid to throw caution to the wind and push the pedal to the floor -- they only hit their own level of disco-punk fervor on Kiss' "Strutter." While their covers of their own tunes are good enough, it's hard to know why they bothered unless they were hoping to get a second paycheck for them 18 years after Fire was released. Streets of Gold is competent and occasionally fun, but for a band built on crazy, this album is disappointingly sane and subdued. It's not the kind of party that will attract the police, and that's not what you want from the Electric Six.