American vocalists who sing in quasi-British accents are so annoying, aren't they? You'll find a lot of that on the second album from Orgy, Vapor Transmission That is, when singer Jay Gordon is not doing his best to out-Manson Marilyn himself.

In fact, Orgy sounds a lot like Marilyn Manson on this album, with touches of David Bowie and New Wave techno-pop added for flavor. The results are completely derivative, although some songs –"Opticon," "Fiction (Dreams In Digital)," and "The Odyssey" – are undeniably catchy. But the aforementioned songs, along with other tracks like "Suckerface" and "Eyes," reek so much of Manson that you'll think you've stumbled into his new album instead.

Overall, Orgy come across as coldly calculated product – more fashion than music, more lab experiment than band. The production (by the band and Josh Abraham) is huge and gleaming, making one think of giant silver skyscrapers in some Logan's Run future-world. But there's no soul to the music at all. It's the audio equivalent of a video game, all special effects and explosions and bombast, with no real feelings or meaning attached to anything. Perhaps that's what the band intends, to be the musical version of an invasion by time-travelling, telepathic alien rulers or something like that. All the songs deal with fashionably cool subjects like computerized life, cybersex, and designer drugs, with most of them written from the point of view of some vast, omniscient "we." But only "Eva," an ode to a missing friend/lover, approaches anything like real emotion or poignancy.

The result is an album that is often amazing sonically, occasionally gripping musically, pretty dopey lyrically, and absolutely empty in terms of real substance. Listening to Vapor Transmission is like getting a shiny new rocket ship for Christmas when you're a kid – and finding out that under the silver paint and blinking lights is just a hollow piece of plastic.

— Don Kaye