UPDATE: This show will no longer be held at MOTR Pub. Instead, it will be held at Northside Yacht Club (4231 Spring Grove Ave., Northside).
As Electric Citizen prepares to enter its 10th-anniversary year with a European tour already on the books for next fall (presumably a near carbon copy of the one that was slated for last fall and scratched for reasons all too obvious), there have been a number of changes in the band’s extended universe.
The most prominent shift in Electric Citizen concerns lead vocalist Laura Dolan, who put the band on the back burner in order to take over her father’s business, Applied Imagination, in 2017, six years after his Parkinson’s diagnosis. Applied Imagination creates scale model environments out of all-natural materials for botanical gardens.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Dolan and the rest of Electric Citizen — her husband and guitarist Ross Dolan, bassist Nick Vogelpohl and drummer Nate Wagner — managed to squeeze in their career-best album, 2018’s Helltown, in spite of her newly minted corporate duties and the time constraints that come with them. Christened after the original 1800s name of the Dolans’ Northside neighborhood, Helltown was Electric Citizen’s most well-received album to date, an impressive feat considering the raves that were lavished on 2014’s Sateen and the slightly more experimental and challenging Higher Time in 2016.
Electric Citizen’s secret weapon has always been a brilliant sense of melodicism, accompanied by a gift for writing concise heavy Rock songs punctuated by whipcrack riffs and powered by one of the most intensely emotive rhythm sections in the Metal-adjacent categories.
In addition to restructuring her father’s business, Dolan also used the non-touring time of the pandemic to write material for a new album and for her and Ross to construct a home studio.
For its first local show in close to two years, Electric Citizen will likely debut some of its new songs alongside the Pentagram-meets-Black-Sabbath faves from the band’s first three releases, but two things are certain: It’s going to be as loud as God’s temper tantrum, and you’ll need proof of vaccination or a negative COVID test to get into MOTR Pub.
Electric Citizen performs at 10 p.m. Friday, Oct. 8, at MOTR Pub. Timmy’s Organism opens. Free. motrpub.com.
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This article appears in Sep 15-28, 2021.
