GET EQUIPPED WITH HYPE – History Repeating: Red

Full disclosure, I’ve become a pretty big fan of The Megas since I first got to see them play the PAX Prime jam space (RIP, jam space). I pretty enthusiastically reviewed their prior album, History Repeating: Blue as well as the B-sides collection, Fly on a Dog. So yeah, I was pretty sure I was going to love History Repeating: Red well before it was released.

When pre-orders for Red went out, I was one of those people fighting an overwhelmed shop queue at midnight and HELLA glad I did. The Megas have handled pre-orders for this album excellently, to the point of where I wish every nerdy band – or just plain indie band – did the same. We pre-orderers had a vague release date (‘near the end of April’), but even more importantly, we had weekly updates. Take note, anybody who’s ever going to do a Kickstarter: regular updates with actual information will make fans forgive a lot of things.

Every week, The Megas sent out an email telling us what they were doing with the album, including a roughly estimate time frame for release, fully explaining why there were some delays. This wasn’t even really necessary – ‘Sorry, we’re The Megas’ would have covered it for most fans. After all, I was reminded recently the Protomen’s Act II is five years old… and we still don’t know much at all about Act III. So The Megas’s updates were a great touch and super positive fan outreach. It helped that we got a lot of neat little bonus material to go along with it – backgrounds, old interviews, previously unreleased versions of songs and demos. The last week before release we also got the first finished track, which was a wise choice, because that’s the track that I listened to on repeat for two days.

The Megas also did awesome stuff like stream work on the album on Twitch, including a late Friday night group vocals session that I was able to watch. It was a great time and these are great guys, fun and funny, and very chill with their fans.

So yeah, I had fallen pretty hard into the fans’ call of GET HYPE. And you know? It was well worth it because History Repeating: Red might be The Megas’s best album so far. It does an excellent job of everything you want from The Megas: smart reworks of Megaman themes, super catchy tracks, great lyrics. It is true that the album isn’t diverse as Get Equipped, there’s not a ton of playing with different styles done in Red. The notable stand out being “GeminEye”, which portrays Geminiman as a noir robot master detective with a split personality (or maybe just an extra head?). “GeminEye” is a clever and surprising song with a sound very different than every other track on the album.

Red does has a far more cohesive sound than Get Equipped or arguably, even its predecessor History Repeating: Blue. I think a big part of this is that only four of ten tracks (“GeminEye,” “Harder Than Steel,” “Afraid of the Dark,” “The Haystack Principle”) are about Robot Masters; the other songs are about the main characters and overall plot of both History Repeating albums as a single story (which is a telling of Megaman 3, of course). Get Equipped‘s central theme was more focused around the individual Robot Masters, which made almost every track of the album a character piece. The sound of Red is wrapped up around the story of its main character, which leads me to talk about my favorite part of this album: Protoman.

Protoman is the coolest of the Megaman series robots. The scarf. The shades. The WHISTLE. So it’s not surprising that the Protoman-centric “I’m Not the Breakman“ has some of the best, most compelling and awesome lyrics of any Megas song yet. “I’m Not the Breakman” is based off of MM3’s  fairly short “Weapon Get” theme but is so expanded and fleshed out with emotion and energy that it becomes one of the best songs on the album. Along with this, the lyrics of “I’m Not the Breakman“ stopped me in my tracks. I’ve talked before a bit about how as much as I loved Get Equipped, the lyrics were occasionally forced and clumsy.  “I’m Not the Breakman” is evidence of how a band that started off great has come so far in just a few years: this song  might be The Megas’ most perfect track yet.

Framed as Protoman’s reveal, “I’m Not the Breakman” lets him tell his his story from his point of view, in an angry rebuke of Megaman (“Killing your own won’t make you human!”) and a bitter accusal of Dr. Light (“I’ve met my maker and the man’s a liar!”). The chorus echoes Megaman’s fears from the last two albums beautifully: “They lost me / forgot me / made you from parts of me / if you’re the one, my father’s son / then what am I supposed to be?”

This song is the ultimate expression of what The Megas have been doing since Get Equipped in 2008: giving these basically silly characters motivation and depth, all structured in extremely catchy music.

This was actually a really difficult album for me to review because it’s extremely hard for me not to just quote song lyrics and type IN ALL CAPS ABOUT EVERY SONG because the whole album is such a fun, evocative ride and The Megas are such cool dudes. I can’t recommend this album harder if you like catchy rock, Megaman, or things that are just pretty much awesome.

Because The Megas are rad, you can preview History Repeating: Red before you purchase it. Check out the rest of their discography while you’re there!