Orgy
Vapor Transmission
Reprise
Following Orgy’s surprise success in 1998 with a cover of New Order’s “Blue Monday,” a media maelstrom ensued, swallowing the band whole as angst-ridden/ready teens flocked in droves to adopt the single and its stunningly visual video as their cry-for-help generation anthem just as readily as critics rose to the occasion and merely focused on the Los Angeles quartet’s decadent demeanor and equally visual appeal. Thus, what was overlooked in the process was that Orgy’s debut album, the unfortunately titled Candyass, showcased a troupe of cracked actors with sumptuous songwriting capabilities to boot – mechanical animals these boys weren’t.
With such epithets as “flash in the pan” and “sophomore slump” staring them in the faces, not to mention naysayers betting on the band’s supposedly imminent fall from grace, Orgy bravely return to the public eye with their second album, Vapor Transmission. What becomes readily apparent from the get-go is the band’s wise nurturing of their latent glam tendencies, crushed with eyeliner, sassing every song with a sexy slur, thusly giving justifiable rise to their (un?)intentional contention for “the new Duran Duran,” especially on dark strutters “Saving Faces,” “Dramatica,” and “Re-Creation.” Saucy and aperture-shut they may be, but Orgy’s gender terrorism derives from an infinitely more artful and sound source: David Bowie. Like Bowie’s technophobic Diamond Dogs updated for Y2K, Vapor Transmission exhibits a certain claustrophobia amongst all the omnipresent technological advances attempting to infiltrate our organic fabric – most notably on “Eyes,” “Chasing Sirens,” and the lead-off single “Fiction (Dreams in Digital)” – but instead opts to turn these advances on their collective head, using them to their advantage by swarming nearly every beat, buzz, pulse, strum, kick, and cry of Orgy’s with handsome amounts of post-digital scrape n’ skree. Truly, much like Trent Reznor’s last few opuses, the album’s sweltering production (courtesy of Josh Abraham and the band) makes a strong case for big-budget spend-thriftiness when the studio is amply used as another (yet integral) instrument: needless to say, headphone-ready – not to mention “sophomore slump”-shattering – as any album ever will be.
