Powerman 5000 are still going? Really? I’ll be honest, despite the band’s perennial place as the go-to band when it comes to labels needing an industrial-metal track for soundtracks (they’ve appeared on scores of the damn things), I really haven’t noticed Powerman 5000 since 1999’s Rob Zombie-approved ‘Tonight the stars revolt!’ However, whilst they may not have appeared on my radar, the band have been ticking over nicely, releasing an album every couple of years to the point that this is their ninth record. Little, it seems, has changed in the band’s world and they still broadly adhere to the juddering blueprint laid out when Marilyn Manson did such an impressive job of commercialising Trent Reznor’s high-tech nightmare with ‘the beautiful people’. The result is an album that is impressively (and expensively) recorded and yet, for all the stuttering electronica, one which ends up sounding somewhat anachronistic for all the attempts at variation in which the band indulge.
‘New Wave’ kicks off, as you might expect, on a high with the heavy, arena-sized stomp of ‘footsteps and voices’. It’s easy to imagine the track opening up a live show, preferably with the band bracketed by a series of seemingly endless pyro displays, and it sees Powerman 5000 digging into the rap-infused industrial rock with which they made their name with considerable vigour. ‘Hostage’ is no less subtle but it’s notable that, where Marilyn Manson has learned to tempter his fury, driving his point home with a make-up-caked sneer, Powerman 5000 keep the pedal to the metal, diminishing the track’s impact despite its brevity. A step up, the amusingly titled ‘Sid Vicious in a dress’ offers a serpentine groove that recalls ‘living dead girl’, albeit with Spider One (Rob Zombie’s brother) channelling his best Marilyn Manson, before ‘David Fucking Bowie’ totally blindsides the listener with a track that sounds like Men Without Hats as it gleefully cribs lines from David’s extensive catalogue. It’s an odd piece of music and one that does little to add to the mythos of its subject matter and which does much to irritate. Unfortunately, things do not improve with the glam stomp of ‘cult leader’, which sounds like a remixed Queen going head to head with the Ramones. It’s energetic and, like a puppy that humps your leg, it’s hard to take it seriously and virtually impossible to shake off. The worst of it is that it all sounds suspiciously like the band are taking a very specific aim at the lucrative soundtrack market, something which predominantly makes you want to stab the damn thing through the heart with a stake made out of Bill Hicks CDs.
The second half of this brief album kicks off with the quiet, introspective track ‘no white flags’. An album highlight, possibly because it sounds so much more natural than the rather ostentatious material found elsewhere, it’s a rare glimpse of the heart inside the machine, but it’s too brief a glimpse and ‘thank god’ sees the band indulge in a single minute’s worth of industrial mayhem reminiscent of Devin Townsend before heading into the Limp Bizkit-esque nu-metal of ‘die on your feet’, a bombastic and rather foolish slice of rap-rock. Returning its baseball cap to the correct position, ‘get a life’ could quite easily be Marilyn Manson with its mean swagger and then, almost astonishingly, the album comes to its end with the rippling electronica of ‘run for your life’, a track, which, like so many on offer here, has a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it quality.
To be quite honest, I can imagine this album being huge in the US. Whether it deserves to be is quite another thing and I similarly have no doubt that ‘New Wave’ will make little impact outside of its home country. The biggest problem is quite how calculated it all sounds, the scattershot approach saying less about the band’s eclecticism and more about their target audience. Whilst every track could quite probably find its way onto a computer game soundtrack (or the score for a teen horror film), it’s hard to imagine many wanting to sit at home and work their way through this record, despite its truncated run time. Whilst there’s undoubtedly a market for such albums out there, this does little that hasn’t been done before (and better) by numerous other artists and it’s a hard thing when the most persuasive defence an album can offer is its brevity. 4
