Blood Splat II

Powerman 5000 crunch to the majors

by Gary Susman

One way for a band to avoid the sophomore slump is to re-release their attention-getting debut. Now that Hub indie-rock faves Powerman 5000 have reinvented themselves as a major-label Los Angeles quintet, that's what they've done, sort of. Their new Mega!! Kung Fu Radio (DreamWorks) features remixed and remastered versions of the cuts on their 1995 debut, The Blood Splat Rating System (Conscious), plus three new songs: the title track, "20 Miles to Texas 25 to Hell," and the hidden track "File Under Action."

Of course, Blood Splat was little heard beyond Route 128. "It represented a first album perfectly, as a combination of things the band had written over the last three years," says singer/lyricist Spider. "We didn't want to write a whole new album in three months. The only fear was that our fan base in Boston already had the record. That was our motivation in putting in a couple new songs and fixing the record. The mastering job on the first album was weak and unaggressive and not loud enough. The new mastering job is great. It's pretty subtle, but it sounds really new to me, and I hope it will to people who have the original."

Mega!! certainly doesn't stint on loud or aggressive, yet it maintains the dexterous balance between hip-hop and metal that made Blood Splat a winner in both categories in last year's Boston Phoenix/WFNX Best Music Poll. Despite sudden tempo shifts, the songs flow together. The solid rhythm section -- the fluid skitterings of bassist Dorian and the Soundgarden stomp of drummer Al and percussionist Jordan -- anchors the band in both funk and hardcore camps. Versatile guitarist Adam 12 hops abruptly and easily from Sabbath-esque power chords to Isaac Hayes-like wocka-wocka chicken scratching to novelty-song twangy goofiness. On top is Spider's growl, coolly rapping in a laconic, Snoop-like drawl or a bellow that inevitably recalls Rob Zombie, Spider's brother (and the band's co-manager).

PM5K are not White Zombie, though Spider and his brother both enjoy dumping their favorite bits of trash culture into a psychedelic blender. "Growing up was this sort of media-junk, museum kind of vibe," Spider explains. "We didn't care about little league. We were more interested in what time Star Trek came on. We were obsessed by a lot of that stuff. It seemed sort of meaningless at the time, but now it all comes into play." Mega!!'s songs are filled with not-yet-overused movie and TV references (lines from Jaws, Taxi Driver, Earth vs. the Spiders, ninja movies) and samples (Star Trek dialogue, Cheap Trick concert noise).

Still, some critics outside Boston dismiss the band as white funk poseurs who got a major-label deal because Spider's brother fronts White Zombie. (The then-cash-starved group's appearance last year on Beverly Hills 90210 didn't help their street cred.) One especially scathing review, in the Manhattan weekly NY Press, slagged the band as the "victory of all that is white, obvious, dull, and contrived over every other possible conception of modern rock" -- and its Boston fan base as "probably the only city in America segregated enough to support a band so removed from the elements of the music they pretend to play."

Marvels Spider, "I guess I just have to get used to it. People assume, because we started our band in Boston, that we were, like, jock/BU frat guys, which couldn't be farther from the truth. I'm the only one from the Boston area [Haverhill]. The others are from, like, Colorado and New York and Pennsylvania and just ended up there. The reviewer kept making these white references, which is weird since Adam's black.

"We had another review that flat-out said the only reason we had a following in Boston and a record deal was because of Rob. None of that is true at all. No one knew the Rob connection until very recently. Rob had absolutely zero to do with the record deal. They didn't know at DreamWorks at the time."

In fact, the band were discovered when future DreamWorks A&R man Ron Handler happened by a New York club where the band were playing, Spider explains. The subsequent move to LA was a business decision that they hope will allow PM5K to avoid joining the list of Boston bands signed and dropped from major labels.

"The tragic flaw of many bands is they don't get involved beyond writing music," says Spider, whose five-minute commute to the DreamWorks office allows him to oversee every detail of the band's marketing. "Jumping from an indie to DreamWorks, I have 100 times more things to do. If you do let it go and let them handle it, they're going to screw it up."