Protomen
There is a very easy litmus test to determine if you should give the Protomen a listen, and it is this: the words Mega Man Rock Opera. If that entire scenario just makes you wrinkle up your nose at the folly of man, well, I’m not sure how you found this website in the first place, but that’s fair enough. Not everyone likes ham with their cheese. But if you like music that reaches for the stars, succeeding wildly or failing gloriously, then the Protomen are for you. And good news – they’re going to be in Seattle tonight.
The relatively thin story of Mega Man (the first six games, mainly) made a surprisingly fertile breeding ground for a used-future saga, in which kindly old Doctor Light “worked far into the night…to create a perfect man, an unbeatable machine, hell-bent on destroying every evil standing between man and freedom.” That’s how it starts, and I can’t say it gets a great deal more cheerful. But it does get more awesome.
The Protomen’s self-titled debut hits the notes you’d expect – Dr. Light creates Protoman, it goes badly, Dr. Light creates Mega Man, it goes better, Dr. Wily’s reign of evil continues – while merging it into a tight narrative of man’s struggle against Dystopia. It reminds a bit of Equilibrium, the Christian Bale vehicle that threw just about every possible dystopia trope and reference into a blender and loaded it with action. Only, this one has battle arms, and is a rock opera.
Musically, Protomen draws a great deal on harder-edged 80s rock (think Queen at their hardest, or Toto songs that aren’t “Africa,”), bent towards the industrial by a sampling of fuzzed synths and distorted vocals. Despite the band’s obvious talent, it’s a raw album, but that fits well into the used-future aesthetic they’re trying to create. Vocalist Raul Panther III (more on that later) wails, snarls, and yelps his way through the grim narrative, and some songs make good use of choral backing vocals and clean piano; luckily, the core of pretty much every song on the album is the Almighty Guitar Riff, as it should be. The album’s top cut is probably the penultimate anthem “The Stand (Man or Machine),” though the punchy “Vengeance,” with its blend of straight-ahead punk rock and breakdown riffs that could have been cribbed from an Iron Maiden recording session, gives it a run for its money. The album certainly works best as a complete piece, though.
For their second effort, the Protomen wrote a prelude, taking further liberties with Mega Man’s narrative to tell the story of young doctors Thomas Light and Albert Wily, and Emily Stanton, the woman who came between them. The result, Act II: Father of Death, is simultaneously both more depressing and charged with a note of hope not present in the debut; it’s a legitimately good story, unlike many concept albums that don’t really stand up stripped of the music that animates them. And Father of Death has both the narrative and the music, and since the latter conveys the former just fine, I won’t spoil you on it.
The Protomen’s growing musical maturity is on full display in Father, which draws from a broader range of genres, utilizing (just to name a few) flamenco guitar, jazz trumpets, orchestral synth, and a wider mix of vocalists to portray Doctor Wily and Emily. It’s a bigger, brighter, cleaner album (as befits a story that takes place before “the world fell into darkness”), with a few songs that wouldn’t sound of place in an 80s action movie and some sections, here and there, resembling nothing so much as an Ennio Morricone score. It’s sharp, polished, and well-paced, and again, relies on a steady core of guitar-based rock and roll to keep the genre detours from getting out of hand.
Of the various songs, there’s a number of standouts. There’s the intro, “The Good Doctor,” a Light-Wily duet that sets a theatrical and expansive tone for the entire album. There’s a trilogy of second-half cuts, essentially a twenty-minute hope spot with the keyboard-heavy, guitar-rocking sound to match, culminating in the straightforward ass-kicker “Light Up the Night.” But the top cut has to be Albert Wily’s declaration of villainy, the sinister, sneering, danceable “The Hounds.” Using your scientific expertise to enforce fascism never sounded so damn cool.
As if that (and the in-development Act III) weren’t enough, the Protomen recently released a live album composed almost entirely of Queen covers. Recording cover tunes is harder than it sounds – you obviously don’t want to butcher well-loved classics, but you also can’t just play them by rote, because then what’s the point of listening to you instead of the originals? The Protomen Present: A Night of Queen walks the line admirably, displaying the full potential of their live ensemble and tilting a few rock and roll classics with enough verve and flair to distinguish them from the originals. “Hammer To Fall,” “Death On Two Legs,” and “The Show Must Go On” stand out, but top to bottom it’s all good stuff.
This is unsurprising, of course, because the Protomen are a kick-ass live band, The band is presently a nine-piece on tour, rejoicing in stage names the likes of Raul Panther, the Gambler, and Turbo Lover, and they take the whole show on the road with them. In large theaters they can put on a whole show, with props and choreography; in smaller clubs they simply rely on the music’s innate theatricality to carry the experience. Either way it’s a hell of a show, and an obvious labor of love – I don’t think any of them are becoming millionaires behind this project, and that is because the universe is an unfair and banal place, but they still leave it all out there on the stage.
There’s a whole meta-mythology woven about the band; they’re not Mega Man characters themselves, but one interpretation is that the Protomen are resistance fighters, keeping up man’s rebellion through rock-and-roll somewhere in the future (or the past…?) An alternate interpretation is that they’re just doing whatever is coolest. And if you are in Seattle, like a good portion of our readership presumably is, you can see them this coming weekend. Not only at PAX, at the Friday night concerts, but the following Monday night at El Corazon. Heads will be crushed beneath the barrage of their rock. Mankind will throw off the the chains of their oppressive masters, possibly by singing along to a Pat Benatar cover.
If you’re not going to be in Seattle this weekend, why then, they regularly tour the venues of the East Coast and their southern home. The Protomen are doing something very cool, and they’re doing it in a way that not many other bands can or will do. Seize every possibility to enjoy it while we’ve got it.
