FEAR FACTORY: Mechanize

Produced by Rhys Fulber and Fear Factory
Released: February 12

Fear Factory was perhaps my favourite band in the mid-90s. I used to listen to Demanufacture every day, saw them everytime they came out including their first Big Day Out appearance where they simply owned and even wore the tour shirt until it fell apart. That said, everything after Obsolete pretty much sucked (although Digimortal isn't as bad as it's painted--take "Back the Fuck Up" off it and it's much better), and I lost interest in them for a long time. It was always going to be interesting to see what they would create after Burt Bell's astonishing announcement last year that he and Dino Cazares were mates again and working under the Fear Factory name once more at the expense of Ray Herrera and Chris Wolbers.

In some regards, Mechanize is an astounding album, the likes of which many probably believed this band would never make again. In the 15 years since Demanufacture, entire movements in the metal genre have risen and fallen, including the nu-metal scene that album's basic sound inspired, so the question was always going to be whether Fear Factory could return and still be relevant.

And the answer is yes, because Mechanize is the heaviest, fastest, most vital and best album they've made since 1998. Like their classic albums, it opens strongly, persists with bursts of controlled brutality fired one after the other with equal precision, then drags toward the end thanks to the uninspired "Designing the Enemy" and pointless interlude "Metallic Division". These are quickly forgotten however thanks to "Final Exit", a brilliant fusion of dynamics, melody, melancholy and crushing heavy metal that is easily one of the best songs they've ever done. Elsewhere it seems that Cazares has dug himself out of his safety bunker a little, coming up with a bunch of new riffs for the Fear Factory machine. My criticism of him in the past was his seeming reliance on a handful of patterns, but on Mechanize he stretches himself further than he has in a decade or more, even squirting out a solo in "Fear Campaign", a track that has a bit of everything including a spoken growl through the breakdown and a fearsome scream of rage right at the beginning. For his part, Burton does what he's always done vocally but at the lyrical level he's changed focus. His writing was always subversive but he's stripped away the Philip K. Dick-style metaphors for the more direct approach he first used on Soul of a New Machine. It's great to hear Rhys Fulber back too. His contribution to Demanufacture is one of the main things that turned it into a landmark and here again, especially on "Final Exit" and "Christploitation", he helps add that layer to the Fear Factory sound that it has lacked for a long time.

Some have accused the band of playing it safe here, and that's fair. Despite a couple of stylistic divergences like a guitar solo, this is very identifiably Fear Factory: the militaristic beats, the rhythmic groove, tight staccato riffs (though somewhat less repetitive than before), the alternating growled/clean vocals--all the things this band originally brought to the genre. But this is what their fans have wanted for a long time and they've shown they still do it better than anyone. Fear Factory is back to being heavy and relevant again. It's almost like the twelve years since Obsolete never happened.

1. Mechanize
2. Industrial Discipline
3. Fear Campaign
4. Powershifter
5. Christploitation
6. Oxidizer
7. Controlled Demolition
8. Designing the Enemy
9. Metallic Division
10. Final Exit

Rating: 78%

DIVINE HERESY: Bringer of Plagues

Produced by Logan Mader and Lucas Banker

Released: 2009

It's certainly a little bit hard to know exactly what to make of Divine Heresy's latest album. With founder and main driving force Dino Cazares now apparently back with the band that made his name and the controversy that surrounded that sudden turn of events, Bringer of Plagues has virtually fallen by the wayside and should the legal wrangling enveloped around Fear Factory be sorted out in Cazares' favour this may well be the last we hear from Divine Heresy.

Few tears would likely be shed if that turns out to be the case, because while it isn't terrible by any means, Bringer of Plagues doesn't really set the world on fire. The vocals are an uninteresting blend of hardcore rasp and Linkin Park-like clean harmonies and a few of the songs are unremarkable. Indeed, the last one-third of the album is quite weak and of the rest only three really stand out.

Cazares lives up to his reputation as a fiendishly tight rhythm guitar player but as usual his repertoire of riffs is deceptively limited. The phrases he puts together are typically catchy and ripping, especially in the pretty decent opening track, "Facebreaker", but almost every other song is built around some variation of the same pattern. Of course, Dino is such a master at this that he gets away with it; his lead playing on the other hand leaves something to be desired. The few solos he throws about are like stuff even Kerry King would throw away, thin bursts of single-note repetition that sound like they were dropped in late to fill a hole. Tim Yeung's drumming, however, has a colour and swing to it that makes him shine, particularly in "Anarchaos" and the track that follows, "Monolithic Doomsday Devices", both of which --especially the first -- are clear highlights.

In most other respects, though, Bringer of Plagues is rather lacking. Except for "Anarchaos", there's very little of the groove that helped make early Fear Factory so special and Travis Neal's generic metalcore vocals are nothing more than average. This one may be good for a few listens, but anyone looking for something more than a few heavy riffs probably won't find much to hold their interest.

1. Facebreaker
2. The Battle of J. Casey
3. Undivine Prophecies (Intro)
4. Bringer of Plagues
5. Redefine
6. Anarchaos
7. Monolithic Doomsday Devices
8. Letter to Mother
9. Enemy Kill
10. Darkness Embedded
11. The End Begins

Rating: 58%

FEAR FACTORY: Obsolete

Produced by Fear Factory, Rhys Fulber and Greg Reely

Released: 1998

Demanufacture established Fear Factory as a successfully innovative band, merging heavy and relentless death metal riffing and ceaseless drumming with injections of cleaner vocals and dark industrial elements. By the time of Obsolete, this basic blueprint had already been imitated across the metal sphere to the point where Fear Factory themselves had to adapt a new gameplan in order to keep ahead of their copyists.

A more creative use of keyboards, the introduction of some symphonic elements, a deeper immersion into Demanufacture's only hinted-at visions of the future and the stripping back of the band's death metal overtones in favour of a more commercial style are the defining aspects of this album. Dino Cazares' riffs aren't that different from before (for example the main descending motif from "Descend" is exactly the same as the main riff from "Replica", but slower) and may indeed be even simpler, but they are catchy and mostly effective and with the added bottom end afforded by his adoption of a seven-string guitar. Raymond Herrera's machine-like drumming is also a familiar feature, but here and there he adds an off-time beat like in "Obsolete". However, the album is really driven by vocalist Burton Bell. His clean singing is as processed as before, perhaps even more so, but instead of the robotic, hate machine roar of Demanufacture, his other voice here is quite raw, giving it a more human quality that is in keeping with the album's concept and that of its main character. For Obsolete is a concept album, and a meticulously conceived one at that.

Expanding on the themes the previous volume only hinted at, Obsolete works as a three act drama with the dissident Edgecrusher as the protagonist, escaping from authority only to be ruthlessly hunted down and eventually recaptured by the forces of the Securitron, his attempted insurgence brutally crushed. In this respect, Obsolete is an even more bleak vision than Demanufacture, which at least ended on a hopeful note. Concept albums are renowned for falling flat, but this one works due to the fact that at this point of their career, Fear Factory was still a fearsome songwriting force with only "Hi-Tech Hate" really coming down on the ordinary side. Elsewhere, while Cazares' riffs are almost unashamedly recycled, the inherent catchiness allows him to get away with it. As mentioned earlier however, Bell owns Obsolete as he characterises the various players from the storyline with surprising emotion and passion for an album of this kind. Evoking exactly the right amount of despair, this is nowhere better illustrated than in "Descent" and, later, "Resurrection" where the Edgecrusher is left to contemplate his failure.

Overall Obsolete may not be quite as successful as its predecessor, but it is still a powerful and heavy album that isn't afraid to take a few chances and proved it could be done. Alas, it was after this that Fear Factory seemed to abruptly run out of ideas, or, perhaps more correctly, run out of good ways to re-present the same ideas.

1. Shock
2. Edgecrusher
3. Smasher/Devourer
4. Securitron (Police State 2000)
5. Descent
6. Hi-Tech Hate
7. Freedom or Fire
8. Obsolete
9. Resurrection
10. Timelessness

Rating: 85%

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%