by "Unspeakable"
Beyond any doubt in my mind, the purinst combination of metal and industrial laid out in a fashion unlike any other band. You have your doom bands, you have your satanist bands, you have your anti-government bands, your drug bands, and even your machine-god bands. However, no other band portrays the struggle for humanity in a world quickly becoming digitized than Fear Factory. A raging scream from a battered soul, in a barren blackened field littered with fax machines, modems, assembly lines, automatic doors and hunter killers, shouting to the winds of fate, "I am not obsolete."
Damn right I like Fear Factory. The first concert I ever witnessed, back in '94 when they opened for Megadeth at Nautica with Flotsam and Jetsom [they sucked back then] and Korn [they were MUCH better back then. scary mulatto farmboys sporting 40s, not whiney freaks with bad teeth]. Of course, this was my first mosh pit and first time crowd surfing, but none of that compares to The Song.
Four Horsemen is the kinda song that gets you pumped. Makes you want to hack up phantoms with a sword. Last Caress gets you pumped. Like a lot of Misfits songs, it makes you want to hurt children. Classic, Fucking Hostile, gets you pumped to go out and start a fight. When I heard Self-Bias Resistor for the first time, I wanted to tear down all opposition, everyone who'd ever told me I couldn't achieve what I wanted, everyone who ever looked down on me, and maim them. I wanted to tear out the rusty chains of society and strangle every ignorant fuck with his hand down his pants and his $3.00 opinion plastered on the bumper of his double-parked pick-up truck. I wanted to suck out the poison that's been fed through my IV and spit in the eye of the Dead goD. I wanted to stand on the highest mountain at dawn, and casting my eyes to the ends of eternity, proclaim "This is mine."
Damn right it's a good song. So I went and got Soul of a New Machine and Fear is the Mindkiller from good ol' Harmony Park. [I miss Rusty. He's off in Virginia somewhere collecting frogs.] Soul' was definitely closer to death metal, with Burton's voice rarely ever rising above grizzle-growl and going harmonic. The album had some killer riffs on it though, and I recommend it highly to anyone who enjoys there heapin helpin of death. Fear is a bit of an oddity, not really teckno remixes as much as the band decided to replace all the original drum machine stuff with blatantly fabricated tinsel beats. I think the band purshased a $25.00 casio keyboard to make these hits. On the plus side, out of the 6 tracks on the cd, the remix of Scumgrief is absolutely haunting. Do not pay full price for it if you can help it. Matter of fact, just download the mp3 of the Scumgrief remix and you'll be happy.
According to Fear Factory, Demanufacture is:
‘A soundtrack for an anonymous person struggling to exist in a world where the sense of individuality is unacceptable... even taboo. A soundtrack for an anonymous person who is sick and tired of government lying to everyone when government conspiracy is a way of life. A soundtrack to spearhead the resistance and create a new society.'
Demanufacture is aggression. Lots of it. The statment above is the backdrop. Fists are the content. It Kicks Ass.
Obsolete is a dark tour inside the twisted world of Edge Crusher. It is a science-fiction concept album based on an escaped prisoner, Edge. Like many concept albums, the songs take you along a story as well as fleshing out the world in which the story takes place. Much like Orwell's 1984, I believe that Fear Factory did not intend for this to be an all too distant future but instead a caricature of current affairs; "this coming vision is reality."
Fear factory's newest, Digimortal, is a venture into the realms of Burton c. Bell's vocal range. It is good, but the guitar is lacking the "[sound that makes you want to commit acts of pure unadulturate violence]-sound" that has accompanied the past two albums. Special "K" and I have discussed the matter as the following.
album focus
the two teckno-remix albums, 'fear is the mindkiller' and 'remanufacture' were 'ff playing with the drum machine' and 'ff playing with loops,' respectively.
many ff fans regard digimortal as a descent for the band, possibly a sign that they are slipping into pop/metal-mainstream and that the have lost their edge. Fear factory has always considered themselves "extremely alternitive," I can only assume emphasis on the Xtreme. Personally, i have always thought of ff as my favorite national band, but i must admit that there's just something missing from some of these songs until i heard them live. Live, every digimortal song they played certainly instilled in me divine righteous rage. perhaps it was the production value, which tweeked the highs and mids in favor of burton's vocals over the guitar. Much of the guitar was computer-fied to give it the artistic quality that seperates them from "bang on frets and make nasty noise" bands. Don't expect to use this one as a defense in a murder trial. Treason yes, murder no.
unspeakable opinion; "if you have no particular allegience to the band, buy a used copy or download the songs. if, like me, you are prone to 'metal-nostalgia,' support the fucking factory-o-fear and hope they continue to kick ass in the face of the conveyor-belt that is america."
7/18/01 [?]
by Unspeakable
DId I say anything about My Dear Fear Factory? They kicked a LOT of ass. The pit was astoundingly brutal, even for the Fact'. Picked up a cool band called Dry Kill Logic. From new york. If you think mixing Korn with ProPain [ei-gad! dangerous!] would sound cool, you've got DKL. Then again, during the show they sounded like Cryptkicker sometimes. Live they sounded nothing like Korn but on their CD the vocals come out different. Anyway, even though I'm no huge Korn fan, I am a huge ProPain/Fear Factory/Grainy-Local-Metal fan, so they=good.
Primer 55 was comendable on stage despite their CD's tendancy to sound like angsty 311 or blink187 [whatever]. You've gotta love a band that starts a raging pit off with the intro from Dukes of Hazard.
The Fact was killer, playing songs from Soul, Deman, Obs and Digi. Digimortal sounds like a good CD but is definitely Vocal heavy. Special "K" and I have been discussing this and it is our conclusion that, being a heavily experimental band, Fear Factory chose to focus each album on one aspect in particular. The rundown [ed. as many of you who can read may have already noticed] goes something like this:
What will come next, we're not sure. Maybe Keyboards? Maybe back to guitars? We don't know. Certainly their overall style has changed from the death-metal form it used to be.
The crown-quote of the evening came from Dino, who introduced "Edgecrusher" as "the song Korn and Limp-Bizkit wished they wrote."
It's a war against the machines.