Remake Remodel

Now, one might argue that all this is Gary Numan meets Dead or Alive with feedbacky guitars, and that Orgy don’t have an original bone in their bodies. The band are the first to admit that their custom-made cyberpunk threads are every bit as important as what they play. “Yeah, we take a lot of our cues from magazines, books, movies,” Derakh says. “We‘re all just a bunch of fashion bitches.” Gordon has a more social-theorist perspective. “We know how things come in 20-year cycles, and I think the industry as a whole is really feeling that. But we’re just having some fun with it. We don‘t want to replay that ’80s thing the same way at all.”

Vacuous as they wanna be, Orgy could be mistaken for Marilyn Manson with trendier clothes, minus the Nietzschean pretensions, crafting hooky darkwave anthems engineered for the KROQ playlist but angsty enough to keep it real for all their Blade Runner--worshipping, sexually confused neo--New Romantic fans. Moreover, you‘d think these commercially successful fashion plates would have no shortage of attitude, but they have much love for their influential friends, like Korn, which signed Orgy to its fledgling Elementree Records.

“That definitely helped in the beginning,” Derakh says. “I think it was pretty forward-thinking of those guys to sign a band like us, which sounds nothing like them.”

On the empathy tip, the track “Eva” is an elegy written about album producer Josh Abraham’s mother. It‘s the kind of highly personal gesture that could easily have been mawkish or insincere, but Abraham was stoked. “I was very close with his mother, so I just tried to write it as though I were Josh’s brother,” Gordon says. “But I still had to make him leave the studio when I was laying it down. I was like, ‘Josh, dude, go home.’”

Derakh and Gordon have produced a handful of up-and-comers like Coal Chamber and SpineShank, and Gordon has his own label, Division One, with ex--House of Pain member Danny Boy‘s project the Ex--Super Models as his first signing. And you might have heard rumors about Gordon’s top-secret project the Wondergirls, a supergroup with Ian Astbury, Scott Weiland and other gods of rock. “That‘s kind of on hold. Because so many different labels are involved, it’s a nightmare from a legalistic standpoint, which I don‘t understand because we’re all part of WEA [WarnerElektraAtlantic]. I‘d think they’d be into it -- it‘s loaded with hits.”

During a show at the Roxy a while back, the band did the ultimate uncool thing: gave it up for their major label. Good PR, perhaps, but Orgy would like to be seen as more than beautiful androids sent back from the future to rock us out in the present.

Says Derakh, “One of the things we’re working on is that we want people to know we‘re a real band and not just this processed thing . . . but we’re definitely that, too.”