Fear Factory

Desensitized by the values of life

Maligned and despaired by government lies

Few bands can boast having earned as much trust for the potential shown at their debut as Fear Factory: after the release of "Soul Of A New Machine", in particular, they became so popular in the underground scene that Igor Cavalera of Sepultura called them "the future of death metal". Within their own niche, the band had established themselves among the pioneers and leading exponents of a new vision of extreme metal, drawing from death metal, thrash metal, the claustrophobic and brutal industrial sound of Godflesh, and even the rotten fury of grindcore. Even more terrifying was the underlying concept: a world in which humanity has created a hyper-technological society where machines are slowly taking over, starting with governmental bodies. The union of man and machine became a constant for Fear Factory: the desperate cry of a society in eclipse.

In the following EP "Fear Is The Mindkiller", however, the project underwent its definitive transformation thanks to the work of Front Line Assembly, who reassembled some tracks from that debut in an alienating, obsessive electronic guise. For Fear Factory it was a revelation, one that led them to create their masterpiece: "We had this vision of how we wanted to sound, and it took a while to grasp and understand what our style was, and how to get there. By the time of 'Demanufacture', all the pieces came together. Lyrically, conceptually and musically, the arrangements, the production... everything worked", recalls singer Burton C. Bell in a 2015 interview with Loudersound. "What we wanted to be was represented by 'Fear Is The Mindkiller', except at the start we didn't have the technology to do it. We didn't have keyboard samples, or those old-school computers that guys like Rhys (Fulber, of Front Line Assembly, ed.) were using. So we tried to emulate those machines with guitar, bass, drums and vocals. If you listen to old industrial bands like KMFDM or Ministry, they sample a metal riff and loop it so that the same riff keeps playing over and over. Well, we wanted to copy that stuff", adds guitarist Dino Cazares.

The band's second studio album, recorded after bringing Belgian bassist Christian Olde Wolbers into the lineup (though he didn't have much time to contribute to the songwriting and was replaced by Cazares on some tracks), is none other than the influential, landmark "Demanufacture," which marks a significant stylistic turning point destined to become a benchmark for others. The record draws first and foremost on the cybernetic, post-apocalyptic science fiction the band devoured at the time, particularly the film "The Terminator," which forms the basis for the aesthetic Fear Factory wanted to adopt. But in truth the band wanted to tie it all to current events they were witnessing firsthand: the 1992 Los Angeles riots and the earthquake that followed in 1994. It was the uprisings, the clashes with police, the looting, the vandalism, the burning cars, the collapsed houses that shook Americans to the core. "Demanufacture was a concept album, but it was inspired by real events. We were in a hostile situation. Throughout the riots you could feel the tension in the air, among everyone. Anyone could be a target. Nobody trusted the police. It was surreal. There were guys on rooftops with semi-automatic rifles, protecting their property. We were living in the age of Demanufacture, fighting against man and struggling to survive," Bell explains.

"Demanufacture" describes, both lyrically and musically, an unsettling, dystopian future society in which machines have taken over humanity; only one man, the concept's protagonist, rebels against the corrupt technocratic government that regulates and dictates the world's every activity, in order to defend his freedom and identity. His, however, is a battle doomed to fail: what Fear Factory depict is an inhuman future precisely because of mankind's intrinsic weakness, by now alienated and enslaved to artificiality, dependent on machines to the point of becoming subordinate components of the system themselves, no longer able to let their own introspection surface. And it's the musical coherence with this message that makes the sonic innovations of "Demanufacture" so effective.

We are the new breed

We are the future

We are immune to life itself

Cold rules are reality

We have control of destiny

We have control of what’s to be

Born, Bred, Beaten

Producer Colin Richardson was pulled off the project partway through because he disagreed with the band's goals. He wanted to emphasize the guitar side and give less space to the electronics, but for Fear Factory the only result of that would have been sounding like just another metal band. So it was Greg Reely and Rhys Fulber who stepped in to collaborate, since the inclusion of electronics was essential to giving their sonic vision a unique character.

The album opens with the precise, hammering beats of the title track, backed by dry, cutting riffs, corrosive electronic samples, and a vocal that starts out static and melodic before turning aggressive and almost roared — conversely, on the even harder "Self Bias Resistor" the vocal starts out ferocious before becoming highly melodic during the chorus's outbursts.

Crushingly heavy, "robotic," yet also strongly melodic, "Demanufacture" marks a decisive, significant evolution in the band's sound, moving away from its death-metal roots to reconnect with a scathing strain of so-called groove-thrash-metal (Pantera, Exhorder, the Sepultura of "Chaos A.D."). All of it, though, is played with an alienating attitude, both in the arrangements and in the atmospheres conjured up. It's a record of pure industrial metal to the core, but it's extreme, violent industrial metal, made particularly mechanical and obsessive by the influence of Skinny Puppy, Prong and Ministry, especially on the disorienting, obsessive, almost dancefloor-ready futurist anthem "New Breed," but also in the unsettling atmospheres of the deadly "H-K Hunter Killer."

The riffs become less jagged and more low-slung and cadenced, without shying away from decidedly melodic openings either. This happens while still retaining a strongly aggressive edge, heightened by Raymond Herrera's hammering, lethal drumming. It's precisely his surgical precision that brings out the "dehumanizing" quality of the songs, with a speed and cleanliness on the kit so extreme that at the time some people suspected it was actually a drum machine (and indeed Raymond does use some triggers to keep time in a few spots, but his overwhelming fury is 100% genuine). Among his most striking performances are the brutal "Zero Signal," the fantastic rhythmic drive of "Flashpoint" and the caustic, relentless "Pisschrist," though Herrera shows superb skill across the whole record.

The other innovative aspect of this combination lies in the crucial electronic openings and the sung melodies of the choruses, expanded and deepened compared to the band's early experiments on their debut. This creates striking contrasts between abrasive guitars that are nonetheless capable of being very catchy, the obsessive, thunderous earthquake of the drums, and Bell's voice, shifting between clean singing and growl. Bell proves versatile and groundbreaking in moving beyond the usual roared vocal — itself derived from Justin Broadrick's vocal lines in Godflesh — to also deliver melodic, impactful passages drawing more on darkwave (which he adored), particularly Carl McCoy of Fields of the Nephilim.

Rarely has a singer switched so effortlessly and immersively between a fierce, violent growl, an explosive hardcore scream, and a clean vocal so enveloping and at times even ethereal. His performance gives the record a peculiar charm, revealing flashes of humanity within the dystopian, digital-nightmare earthquake traced out by the instrumentation. This melodic streak would go on to influence numerous alternative-metal, nu-metal and groove-metal bands on both sides of the Atlantic (worth mentioning are certainly Korn, Machine Head and Soilwork).

The electronic side, meanwhile, is the domain of guest Rhys Fulber, whose contribution shines especially on the closing "A Therapy For Pain," a slow, atmospheric post-apocalyptic digression where guitars and drums become slow, cadenced and barely hinted at, when they don't fade into the background altogether, making room for anguished keyboard patterns and a melancholy vocal.

The end result is a combination as electrifying as it is avant-garde, fusing extreme metal with the industrial world, dehumanized by heavy use of techniques like palm muting or double-bass drumming, but above all by the imposing, mechanical attitude carried through into the songwriting — essential to fully convey the idea of the technological dystopia the band was depicting, and to maximize the concept's unsettling atmosphere. All of this would later spawn 1997's "Remanufacture," a remix album steeped in big beat, drum & bass and hardcore techno, unfortunately far less devastating and engaging.

Serving as an influential point of reference for new generations of extreme and industrial bands, "Demanufacture" ultimately stands as one of the most innovative and influential metal records of the '90s, both on the instrumental and vocal fronts, not to mention thematically, given the psychological violence that saturates every note and makes the sound even more anguished, cynical and merciless. Without a doubt, it's one of the most genuine and evocative musical portrayals of the conflicts between man, society, politics and technology of that decade.

By this point we had also entered the era of so-called "post-thrash," an umbrella term (and, like many "post-" somethings, perhaps not the most sensible one) coined by a segment of the music press, initially applied to groove-metal alone and later to numerous fundamentally different bands that nonetheless shared thrash and/or groove-metal building blocks combined with extreme, experimental tendencies (such as Sepultura, Nevermore, Strapping Young Lad, Meshuggah, Mnemic, etc.).

The machine is now alive

To wreak havoc in your lives

There's no use to hold me back

I am ready to attack

Ride the wave of great music

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09/02/2020