REVIEW: Fear Factory, Obsolete (RoadRunner)
- Sean Eric McGill
I like being surprised by the new music I hear. I like it when something completely throws me and goes places I didn't think it would. Obsolete, the third full-length album from Fear Factory does that in a number of ways. The album alternates between full-froth head-banging to smooth grooves, and yes - even a full eleven-piece orchestra - usually within one song.
Fear Factory is one of a handful of bands that truly has its own distinctive sound. When you hear a Fear Factory song, you know it, and that's probably the biggest key to the success of Obsolete. While songs like "Hi-Tech Hate" are fairly straightforward cranium-banging fests, and "Timelessness" (which features the eleven-piece Vancouver Chamber Ensemble) are both distinctively Fear Factory.
Part of it is the lyrical delivery of Burton C. Bell, who can be smooth and melodic one moment, and delivering lines with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer the next. More than any other track, "Resurrection" sums up the album better than any other. After working on smooth melodies for about the first minute, the song kicks in - and if you're not ready for it, it'll throw you hard. Before long, Bell and the remainder of the band are not just switching the sound from soft to hard between verses, it's between measures. And that's the Fear Factory sound. Just when you think it's going in one direction, it goes in another, while never straying away from the core, which is fairly straight-forward heavy rock.
"The concept of this record is that man is obsolete," says Bell, so who better to produce the album than Rhys Fulber, whose past resume includes previous stints with Front Line Assembly and now with Delirium, Intermix, and Will? Fulber, who also produced the band's 1992 remix album, Fear Is the Mind-Killer , once again shows his ability to bridge the gap between hard rock and industrial. The album really does have a predominately mechanical sound to it, especially from the drums of Raymond Herrera, which at times resemble loops with their speed. At a time when a lot of bands and artists either dabble in one genre or the other (I fully expect a techo Puff Daddy song by the end of the year), it's truly interesting to hear when a group nails it dead on and still manages to put their own distinctive stamp to it. This isn't a Ministry album, nor a Nine Inch Nails album - it's a Fear Factory album.
