As opening salvos go, the introductory line on the new Powerman 5000 album, Transform (DreamWorks), their first in four years, is worthy of Leonard Nimoy or Bill Lee or Major Tom. " I’m not a spaceman, " growls frontman Spider One. That may sound a little quaint coming from a guy who was prancing around in a 2001: A Space Odyssey–vintage pressure suit the last time we saw him, and whose video for the band’s hit single, " When Worlds Collide " (from the 1999 DreamWorks album Tonight the Stars Revolt), paid tribute to old Flash Gordon serials. " But on the other hand, " he sings on the new disc’s opener, " Fake Revolution, " " I never really did fit into this world. "

On Transform, Powerman have indeed ditched the flight suits, the goggles, and the moon boots, and they’ve also toned down the sequencers, samples, drum triggers, and other electronic/industrial flourishes that inevitably drew less-than-kind comparisons to Spider’s brother, Rob Zombie. Instead they’ve turned their attention to rock-and-roll rebellion — or, more precisely, the lack thereof in contemporary music. Fight the power, man.

" That opening line — I just think it’s hysterical, " says Spider over the phone from a Midwestern stop on a tour that hits Avalon on Wednesday. " But of course it doesn’t translate. I just read a review of the album in Spin magazine. They gave us a horrible review, which is no surprise — but they completely missed the humor of it. They’re like, ‘Uh-oh! He’s not a spaceman anymore! It’s all downhill from here!’ Maybe it’s just me, but if you open your record with the line ‘I’m not a spaceman/But on the other hand,’ I dunno how serious that’s supposed to sound. "

Changing gimmicks midstream is never easy — after all, everyone remembers Kiss Unmasked. " A funny thing happens when you have your big record, " Spider says. " Everyone identifies you with that particular moment, and they don’t look any further back. So there was this assumption that we were the ‘space band’ — which we were for that year, and I would never disown that. It was great and cool and fun. But I don’t want to do the same thing every time we make a record. Since we disappeared for a few years, and we had some personnel changes, it was really the perfect time to redefine the band again. "

There has been a fair bit of drama since " When Worlds Collide " drove Revolt to the platinum mark and put Powerman on the national map. They recorded a follow-up, Anyone for Doomsday?, and in 2001 it was so close to being released that advance copies were sent to the press, most major glossies reviewed it, a single was delivered to radio, and a tour was booked. Clocking in at just over a half-hour, the 13-song disc refined the formula of its predecessor and added a few bold new twists. But the reviews were mostly unfavorable. ( " Drugs are cheaper and last longer, " Rolling Stone opined.) Spider had his own reservations, so he pulled the disc from the DreamWorks release schedule at almost the last possible minute, ostensibly to rework its contents. In the aftermath, the rhythm section — long-time bassist Dorian Heartstrong and drummer Al Pahanish — quit, and Spider opted to shelve the entire disc and start over from scratch.

" The formula that most people follow is that they have success, and then it’s like shampoo — rinse and repeat, " he says. " And I think we fell into that trap a little bit. We didn’t take any chances. We made a bigger, louder, uglier version of Tonight the Stars Revolt, which was exactly what a lot of fans wanted. Pulling the album was certainly not the smartest financial move, or a timely career move — at a time when bands are forgotten after six months, to disappear for an extra year on top of the time you’ve already been away is not a smart thing to do. But at the end of the day, I’m really glad we did it. "

I still think Spider sold Doomsday a bit short: there were two songs on the album that sounded unlike anything they’d done — though both were throwaways that got tacked on at the end. " Megatronic " was a wholly synthesized robo-disco track with a vocoder vocal that sounded more like Afrika Bambaataa’s " Planet Rock " than the funk-metal/rap-rock hybrids of the band’s early indie discs. And the closing ballad " The Future That Never Was " summoned up the æthereal spirits of Ziggy Stardust–era Bowie.

The electro vibe resurfaces briefly on Transform’s " That’s Entertainment, " the song that most closely resembles the band’s old electro-metal incarnation, and the one that most viciously skewers Top 40 pop vapidity. In the manner of Marilyn Manson on Mechanical Animals, it makes a point of resembling the thing it’s railing against — and as such ends up being one of the disc’s highlights.

" You can’t rage against the machine anymore, " Spider explains. " The enemy is just too fucking big, and your only weapon is confusion. That’s what the line in the song ‘Fake Revolution’ is about: ‘A battle won and lost with confusion.’ Meaning that you have to become something that they can’t so easily identify and steal and sell right back to you. There’s this great Clash song called ‘Garageland’ where Joe Strummer says, ‘Back in the garage with my bullshit detector,’ and I’ve come to the conclusion that we’ve all sort of lost the ability to use our bullshit detectors. That’s sort of what this record is about — youth culture has been recycled and regurgitated and co-opted more than ever. Like Avril Lavigne’s a punk-rocker. But we all believe it for some reason, whereas a few years ago kids would’ve seen right through it. "

In the bio accompanying Doomsday, Spider is quoted as saying, " Being in a band is as close as I could get to being a superhero. " Although he doesn’t say so in as many words, one suspects that this time around he intuited that the age of the heavy-metal superhero was in decline. And the chorus of Transform’s first single, " Free " ( " Living so free is a tragedy/When you can’t be what you want to be " ), suggests he’d grown tired of the fantasy.

" One thing I find to be true with a lot of the bands that I meet, " he admits, " is that a lot of times you become something musically that isn’t necessarily what you are. I never listened to heavy metal growing up, and to all of a sudden be considered a metal band is kind of bizarre. I grew up with punk rock and going to see SS Decontrol at the Channel, and Hüsker Dü and the Minutemen and Black Flag. My favorite band of all time is the Clash. And now I love Blur and all these British bands. But I started to realize that there isn’t even a hint of that in the music we write, and that felt really weird to me. So now you’re starting to hear a little bit of all that. I think of the bridge in ‘Free’ as sort of a Clash moment; I think ‘Action’ has an element of Blur about it. The first time we played the song ‘Transform’ for our management, they thought it sounded like PiL. "

Which isn’t to say that they’ve turned into a Britpop band. Most of the songs on Transform stick to straight-ahead, hard-rocking verse/chorus/verse songwriting with an emphasis on heavy guitars and simple hooks. Although " Song About Nothing " borrows its name from a song that dates back to Spider’s pre-Powerman hip-hop incarnation, the chorus takes its cues from Nirvana’s " Heart Shaped Box. " Even when Spider does go back to rapping, on " Stereotype, " the song ends up breaking into a chorus that recalls the same obsession with Cars-style new-wave pop that led Powerman to cover " Good Times Roll " on Tonight the Stars Revolt.

Neither have the band abandoned their flair for telegenic threads. " I still love bands with strong images, " Spider says. " I always loved the idea of the Sex Pistols, who looked like they just rolled out of a dumpster, but their clothes were strategically designed by Vivienne Westwood. I like that idea of calculated chaos. So I’m trying to follow that philosophy with the image of the band: I think you’ll see that old Sex Pistols/Clash vibe, spray-painting slogans on our clothes and things like that. "

Of course, if it doesn’t work out, there’s always the old look — just consider Kiss. " Exactly, " Spider laughs. " We’ll be 50 years old, trying to squeeze into the spacesuits. "

CURVE OF THE EARTH is known best as a refuge for big, loud rock and roll — and as the original home of Powerman 5000. But its latest release couldn’t be less typical. Your Wate and Fate, the ambitious debut by Mission Hill’s Araby, is a welcome, if completely unexpected, addition to the recent lineage of progressive indie rock. Sunny Day Real Estate are a touchstone, both in the high falsetto vocals and in the band’s knack for following tricky time signatures and cryptic melody lines into unexpectedly anthemic payoffs.

" Truth To Tell " begins by extrapolating outward from the bass line of Fugazi’s " Waiting Room, " tricking it out until it chimes like Jejune running Promise Rings around the Wicked Farleys, then pushes forward to one of those Beatle-esque space-rock moments you used to find on Radiohead records. " As You Would Have " has enough weirdness — ambient radio transmissions, gongs, echoes — to qualify it for the honeymoon suite at the Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. Singer/guitarist Cliff Rawson has a pair of master’s degrees in jazz from Berklee, but though his chords are complex, they’re never oblique: he works in a speedy upper register and isn’t afraid to step on the stompbox. " Ringside " builds to the kind of propulsive, galloping sing-along the kids love these days. And the enigmatic, almost Baroque chamber-emo dirge " Fools " suggests there’s more common ground than you’d expect between, say, Sunny Day’s " Killed by an Angel " and Mary Timony’s The Golden Dove.

MAYBE IT’S JUST the needle-in-the-red production values, or the back-to-basics chord changes, but suddenly post-hardcore sounds fun again on Read Yellow’s homonymous debut EP (Fenway Recordings). Based in Amherst, and formerly known as the Sharks (a moniker too obvious not to have already been claimed by a psychobilly outfit), the band kick up the kind of ecstatic racket you’d expect to hear in the basement of the Dischord house if anyone there ever got laid. Half the members list a Fugazi album as their all-time favorite, and the chick bassist gives that honor to Refused — all heavy influences on the EP. " The Association, " a video for which is set to air on MTV2, sounds like Guy Picciotto after an all-night Guitar Wolf bender. The chorus — " Will you follow me home? Will you swallow me whole? " — might not have been intended as a pick-up line, but how much you wanna bet it’ll be one at the Model Café this weekend? And " Fashion Fatale, " the EP’s token garage-rock howler, will make a nice segue from the Hives’ " Hate To Say I Told You So " at your local punk disco.

Powerman 5000 open for Stone Sour this Wednesday, May 28, at Avalon; call (617) 423-NEXT. Araby celebrate the release of Your Wate and Fate this Friday, May 23, and Read Yellow celebrate the release of their EP this Saturday, May 24, both at the Middle East; call (617) 864-EAST.