FEAR FACTORY: Demanufacture

Produced by Colin Richardson

Released: 1995

Los Angeles isn't well known for producing really heavy bands but the sprawling City of Angels spewed forth just such an entity in the early 1990s. That entity was Fear Factory, a band that, with its very first album, had taken death metal in directions that it had not previously explored. With the second, they achieved perfection. On Demanufacture, Fear Factory did everything they had done on Soul of a New Machine, but better, bigger and with immense production. Mixing pounding, ridiculously tight death metal and the gloomy Gothic industrial elements of bands like Godflesh and Bauhaus into hook-ridden songs with the clinical sound that would stagger a Top 40 producer, Fear Factory created one of the best albums of the early 1990s and one that still remains an indomitable classic. Demanufacture is so good that even the band that made it has been unable to top it and the tide of imitators who followed haven't even come close.

The formula behind this album's success is almost absurdly straightforward: deceptively simple, repetitive and crushing riffs, catchy grooves, insidious melody and plain, old-fashioned decent songwriting. Combined with that is an injection of electronics and sustained passages of clean singing at a time when such a thing just wasn't done in the arena of death metal and Demanufacture had all the elements of a successful recipe.

The title track opens the album with a machine-gun riff that you would sacrifice your own offspring to write and right when you think there can't be another as killer as this one, Dino Cazares just keeps throwing them up like he's building another Berlin Wall. Only Malcolm Young and (maybe) Jon Shaffer could deliver so many variations on the same three phrasings and make all of them as mind-numbingly effective as those on this album. In the engine room behind Cazares ceaseless wall of guitars, Raymond Herrera lays down meticulously tight beats and upfront is the remarkable vocals of Burton C. Bell, ravenous hate machine one moment, choirboy the next. On top of that is the sharpness and clarity of the mix, and the cold, clinical keyboard contributions of Front Line Assembly's Rhys Fulber that gives Demanufacture its dehumanising atmosphere. Surmounting it all is a barrage of excellent, heavy and unrelentingly catchy songs: "Demanufacture", "Zero Signal", "Self-Bias Resistor", "Replica", all fired off one after the other like tactical nuclear warheads. There's a riff in "New Breed" that's so heavy it's like getting hit by a truck and the oft-overlooked "Body Hammer" is just as strong as the album's opening quartet. The consistency does drop a little after this with the next two songs, but then the all-conquering "Pisschrist" smashes everything in its path. Finally, Fear Factory offers some respite with the Bauhaus-inspired "A Therapy for Pain" closing on a less intense if somewhat bleaker note.

Demanufacture is the epitome of industrial death metal, a blueprint that was stained and marred by a myriad of pretenders since, but a statement in cybermetal perfection that may never be topped.

1. Demanufacture
2. Self Bias Resistor
3. Zero Signal
4. Replica
5. New Breed
6. Dog Day Sunrise
7. Body Hammer
8. Flashpoint
9. H-K (Hunter-Killer)
10. Pisschrist
11. A Therapy for Pain

Rating: 98%