Apartment 26 (file)
Photo: Atlantic

Many critics cried "nepotism!" after Apartment 26 opened their doors in 2000 and soon found themselves on the Ozzfest tour.

Band frontman Biff Butler, son of Black Sabbath bassist Geezer Butler, admitted his group had little else to hang its Pony baseball caps on, especially since its industrial-metal debut album, Hallucinating, was unfocused and derivative.

"We were signed right out of high school and didn't know what we were doing," Butler said. "A lot of bands were pissed off about the opportunities we were getting, so we had to try a lot harder to earn any sort of respect."

On their second album, Music for the Massive (out February 24), Apartment 26 have re-emerged a changed band. They still play loud, aggressive music that wouldn't feel out of place at Ozzfest. But rather than latch on to current trends, the bandmembers have mined new forms of precious metal, combining raging songs with jazzy textures and unconventional time signatures.

"We stopped listening to rock, especially our contemporaries, while we worked on the record," Butler explained. "We stuck our fingers in our ears and developed our own stuff. Rather than say, 'Oh, what's Korn up to?' or 'What's Limp Bizkit doing?,' we influenced each other."

Apartment 26 worked on Music for the Massive for most of 2002. At first, the songs were dark and bleak, overcast with introspection and doubt. But that soon got boring.

"We were writing together every single day, so after a while we started doing things to entertain each other," Butler said. "We'd do these weird things musically, and some of them were good. That's why a lot of the album sounds more fun than a lot of current rock."

The LP's first single, "Give Me More," starts with industrial noises and a jaunty piano line. Then a shuffling beat foxtrots with a swinging bass line before the chorus explodes into shards of rage. "That song was our turning point," Butler said. "We wrote it a long time ago but couldn't think of anything to do with it. Then we started to dabble with jazz and decided to make a major U-turn."

Lyrically, "Give Me More" addresses paranoia, exploitation and fear. Yet rather than dwell on dysfunctional relationships and personal affronts, Butler confronts political and societal woes abstractly. "It's about paranoia," he said, "There's a Big-Brother's-out-to-get-you theme. It's sort of about the post-9-11 age. The opening line is 'You watch it settle down and then capitalize on whatever moves.' That's about using one thing as an excuse to get away with whatever else you want, whether it's the Patriot Act or whatever."

While Music for the Massive contains numerous anti-music-industry lyrics, Butler was careful not to bloat the record with bitching and moaning. As much as he hates people who judge him for being the son of a rock star, he has equal contempt for those who use their creative energies merely to complain.

"It really bothers me when bands reach a certain point of success but still whine about stuff," Butler said. "There's a lot of moaning out there by a lot of well-to-do white people. There's a lot of rage on our album but no feel-sorry-for-me-because-I-didn't-get-a-bike-for-Christmas kind of thing. I may be angry, but I'm not pathetic."

• Apartment 26

As Apartment 26 took the stage Thursday night at New York's Irving Plaza, one of the most powerful men in entertainment, Disney Chairman Michael Eisner, leaned over the railing of the club's balcony to check on his investment.

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