By Martin Popoff
Pretty funny watching metal folk debate and pontificate Fear Factory's place in the scheme of things. Some see the band as participants and even followers of trendy metal tones. Others notice the fact that this band was actually a leading force years ago in bringing many of today's metal sounds to fruition. And by sticking to their guns, albeit the cannons of recent albums (things have changed quite a bit since '92's Soul Of A New Machine), the band find themselves fully competing with brash upstarts who owe quite the debt to Burton C. Bell and his cybergang.
Ergo goes Digimortal, following by about a month, the news that the band's '98 album Obsolete, has just gone gold in the States.
As it turns out, the band are quite cognizant of finding songs that are a little more, shall we say, memorable, experiencing the usual label suggestions of outside producers and even a little songwriting help. "Yes, there was pressure," begins bassist Christian Olde Wolbers. "And we actually started to look for an outside producer but then we came to the realization that it was better to stick to our guns and stay with Rhys Fulber and upgrade him to be more like the actual Fear Factory producer than look into another big producer that would only try to give us a new sound. That's what we were afraid of, that he wouldn't take the Fear Factory sound as it already existed but try and do something new with the band that was going to be too much off-the-wall. We wanted to stay with the true sound of Fear Factory but expand it a little bit, write some better songs, and in some songs, put in a little more melody. And after a while we realized we can do that on our own, and we just needed a little help with someone coming in and giving us different ideas with respect to arrangements. We were getting into a rut and following the same structures. It's very hard for us to let people into our circle because we've been working on this thing for so long and so hard. But we were open-minded and that was part of the progressive part of maturing. Open up our minds, have someone come in to work on a few parts of songs. Rhys Fulber still produced the album but we just had two different people come in, Bob Marlette and Malcolm Springer who worked on three songs. But Rhys was always there as an integral part."
FEAR FACTORY - New and Nu Before You Page 2