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Live Review
by SashaS
10-12-2004
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| Fear Factory: flights of passion + credo |
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Live: Fear Factory
Astoria, London
Thursday, December 9, 2004
Fear Factory and songs with loaded opinions
Fear Factory, after a dozen years of music making (minus the de-activated period), still delight in doing it with their middle-finger in the mainstream’s direction. Their kinda rock simply defies all the stereotypes developed over the years, challenging the cosmetic punk, re-dressed Metal, re-heated grunge… [Have you heard Altern Bridge? Creed-with-a-new-singer continues to be Nirvana tribute band despite recording ‘new‘ songs!]
Fear Factory stand tall, lonely and humongous: on a stage sans any décor but the lightshow, they sound powerful, exciting, engaging and - blimey, quite paranoia-causing by the entire auditorium singing-along almost all of the time!? Wow, such devotion, such fanatic and frantic fandom, that’s entertainment! And, it looks like the temporary [as it turned out to be] splitsville benefited the band greatly, luckily for a lot of the HM-heads.
What Burton C. Bell and the three musicians provide is like continued series of explosions inside one’s skull: FF have never asked leading questions but offered loaded opinions! They are one of the most intel-rockers on the scene and so surreptitious they incorporate an incredible array of styles with ease that in other groups’ chords, probably, wouldn’t work. There are elements of Goth, Brit-pop, industrial, prog as well as practising very complex arrangements, sudden instrumentation and tempo-changes, the general sonic dynamics…
Fuelled by colossal drumming of Raymond Herrera - who’s maturing as a killer cross-over of John Bonham and Stewart Copeland [re: Police] - and the new bassist, Byron Stroud, the rhythm section lays huge and intricate basis for songs that allow Christian Olde Walbers to fly in all directions - riffing, ‘soloing’, posing - and singer to breakout of his own verbal purgatory. BCB warns us about ‘Bite The Hand That Bleeds’ [as featured on ‘SAW’ OST recently] but do humans ever listen, learn anything from own mistakes even?
Walbers’s six Marshall amps sported one letter each, ‘R.I.P. D-B-D’ with Burt addressing the tragic shooting of Damageplan’s ‘Dimebag’ Darrell Abbott by asking for a “moment of silence” [this pumped-up crowd couldn’t keep it hush for a minute] before dedicating the fierce, brutal, mega-Watt’d ‘Martyr’ [off the debut ‘Soul of a New Machine’, 1992] to the slain axeman. Mixing material from the current album, ‘Archetype’, the title track performed toward the end, with a selection of older tracks and a cover of Nirvana’s ‘School,’ Fear Factory more than deliver, they ignite!
Most of the songs come at fans like turbo-charged HumVees out of control, without injuries but mental, and perhaps - hormonal, liberation. The Fear Factory quartet have found some new lease of creativity since their temporary disbanding/reassembling, fresh vitality and resolve to explore the extremism of deviant-metal and getting-more-violent dystopia. FF may be the sound of the future increasing in malevolent tendencies…
Whilst there is de-evolution of spirits going on, death of imagination and general wastage from the ‘Terminator’-like industrial hill, FF bravely rocket on, pushing us beyond the orbits, into outer dominions, nearing the event horizon…
SashaS
10-12-2004
Fear Factory's album 'Archetype' is available now via Roadrunner
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