I always feel a little weird jonesing for The Protomen, since I can’t help but shake the feeling that I’m the last person to know about them in the first place. I somehow managed to not get the memo about them for like three years after their eponymous first album was released, and in spite of chatter that I know I heard, I was first introduced to them through an AMV linked I-don’t-even-remember-where. This post is full of shame!

Now that those unpleasant admissions are behind me, I should get to the real point: The Protomen are a band who, in 2005, released a rock opera based on the Megaman games. They’ve actually produced something far more original and high-quality than you’d expect from that brief descriptor; their first album took the characters of the early NES Megaman games, mixed them with the darker, post-apocalyptic tone of the later Mega Man X games, and turned them into an Orwellian story about Megaman’s quest to liberate the world from Dr. Wily and his army of robots. Though bleak in tone, it’s got a far wider stylistic range than you’d see from most bands; it’s a catchy, solid album. After this, the Protomen were relatively quiet for several years as a sequence of Code: Not This Shit Again countdowns appeared on their website- but finally, earlier this month, they released their second album- Act II: The Father of Death.

Act II, unexpectedly, is actually a prequel to The Protomen, expanding on the background of Doctors Light and Wily. It’s interesting but unsurprising that The Protomen seem to be moving away from major copyrighted characters- while Dr. Light is the main character of Act II, it also devotes a lot of time to Dr. Light’s wife Emily and the prototype robot Joe. The Protomen seem to assign different styles to different characters- Dr. Light’s blues-y sound or Joe’s so-very-80s rock. There are a couple subtle callbacks to their first album as well- it’s a nice touch.

There are a couple issues with Act 2- the ‘story’, such as it is, feels a little garbled at points. Breakin’ Out is a good song, but I’m not entirely sure where it fits in with the big picture- I’m not sure who’s singing, but there’s no character for whom it makes sense. As with The Protomen, the story is ultimately rather bleak, even if it does have some notable high points. These are minor complaints, though- it’s absolutely worth listening to, though, and a solid followup to The Protomen.

Both The Protomen and Act 2 are available on iTunes- they’re definitely worth checking out.

- HC

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 24th, 2009 at 8:17 pm and is filed under video games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.