Rage Of The Machine

"Growing up in Los Angeles, me and Burton [vocalist Burton C. Bell] saw a lot of things that were going on there,” Fear Factory guitarist Dino Cazares recalls. “From [1992 debut LP] Soul of a New Machine to by the time [1995's] Demanufacture came out, in between all that time there was fires, floods, earthquakes, riots. It was just massive destruction in LA. There was a point during the LA riots that we thought that LA was going down. The city was on fire, people's businesses looted, everything was on fire, just crazy; people running in the streets, people shooting each other. It was complete anarchy and very apocalyptic.

“We just thought, 'Okay, after all this destruction in LA, something new's coming'. Then we also tied it in with technology, because the world was changing. But in order for the world to change, something had to be broken down first, and that was Demanufacture. The theme of Demanufacture was breaking it down, and then something new was coming. The breaking down was the machines were taking over and fighting all the humans, and machines were the change. Technology was the change. And there was one man who's fighting for humanity… There was a guy who was fighting against the machines, he was spearheading the militia that were fighting against the machines, and that's what that whole record was about.”

Demanufacture, the US metaller's second full-length surfaced amid a vastly different climate within heavy music and the planet at large. Infusing influences from Godflesh and Napalm Death, Soul… was a polarising yet vital album, introducing industrial touches and clean vocals to the death metal format. However, it was but a teaser for the follow-up. Stripping away much of the death metal overtones, Demanufacture showcased Fear Factory morphing into a cold, taut and mechanical entity. The jackhammer-like delivery was heavier than a sack of anvils, soundscapes eerily atmospheric while each song bristled with irresistibly catchy hooks. In addition to its musical ideas being ripped off wholesale, the man-versus-machine lyrical theme became one of their defining characteristics. It also introduced them to legions of new fans – even scoring their first gold record worldwide in Australia.

Speaking from the back of their tour bus in California, Cazares explains that much of the record's genesis was rooted in a remix EP released during 1993. “We just got better at writing songs, and we didn't do a lot of useless riffs. Like, there's a few songs off of Soul… that we thought, 'Okay, we can just trim out the fat and make a better, well songwriting-crafted album', and that's pretty much what we learned, how to do that better.  I think the intensity we kept. We've always been somewhat very aggressive. But I think the big difference is obviously in the songwriting. We got better, Burton's vocals got better, we got better production.

“Soul…, when that record first came out, there was no such thing as computer Pro Tools, or nothing like that. There was no such thing as 24-bit recording. So that record's very raw, and the producer that we had on that record was also like more of a death metal/grindcore-type of producer. That was kind of what we were going for on that record, but we wanted to be more towards a cyber/industrial metal band. So when we went in to do Fear Is the Mindkiller, that's when we met Rhys Fulber... We'd talked about what we wanted to do on that EP. We were like, 'We still want to keep the elements of Fear Factory; we still want to keep it heavy. We want to keep the heavy vocals, heavy guitar, but we just want to add electronic music on top of it, more industrial, electronic samples'.

“When we created that EP we were like, 'Wow'. Some of those songs like Scapegoat, the version on the EP; that should have been what we sounded like on Soul.... So when we went into Demanufacture, we had a clearer vision of what we wanted to sound like. And it was a crossbreed between Soul... and Fear is the Mindkiller. Then we just perfected our craft at songwriting. We did a demo for the album and it pretty much has the same vibe [as the finished product]. By the time we did this record, we pretty much had solidified what we wanted to do and how we wanted to sound.

“Then unfortunately we had hired a producer named Colin Richardson, who we used on the first album, to do the second album. But we had surpassed what he thought we should sound like. So we got rid of him. There was one point where I thought this record was never going to get done. We ended up firing our producer, because he didn't exactly see the vision or the direction that we wanted to go in. We ended up hiring Rhys Fulber and Greg Reely to finish off the production… A lot of money later we finally finished the record,” the guitarist adds with a chuckle.

It wasn't just a producer threatening to hold them back that Fear Factory had outgrown either – they'd also progressed far beyond the death metal scene they were associated with early on. Not that Cazares views it that way. “Some of those death metal fans, that's really all they like, you know what I mean?” he ponders. “Cannibal Corpse, and so on. We were much more than that. Nothing bad against death metal, but we always thought that we had more; more than just being a typical band lumped in with all the other death metal bands.

“Obviously it showed, because we became a pretty worldwide known band and we sold quite a lot of records. We surpassed what a death metal band would do, or what a death metal-style band would do. We surpassed all that, and we never really considered ourselves a death metal band at all. People just gave us that tag, you know? We always felt that Fear Factory was much more than that. Demanufacture definitely proved that, and then [1998's] Obsolete obviously [was] even bigger.”

The Demanufacture material has clearly stood the test of the time, as the band will perform the entire album for the first time ever in Australia, where, as the guitarist points out, it all started for them. The initial 1996 tour Down Under in support of it was cancelled after just one show due to Bell's illness and the subsequent riot at the Sydney venue covered by the mainstream media. As for that era of Fear Factory, the mention of former bandmates Raymond Herrera and Christian Olde Wolbers is about the only occasion the typically outspoken, frequently jovial riff-meister noticeably keeps his response succinct. “That's been out of the picture for years now,” he emphasises when asked if any consideration was given to involving them in the Demanufacture-themed tour. “If anybody it would have been Raymond. Christian, his face was on the album, but he didn't play on the album and he didn't write anything on the album.”

Cazares and Bell will instead be joined by the current line-up of Matt DeVries (bass) and drummer Mike Heller. The guitarist says there was no significant reason for undertaking a run performing the whole record (“We just thought that it would be a good thing to do”), and at the time of our conversation wasn't certain how they would structure the set.

“We are still talking about that. You're definitely going to get the full album of Demanufacture. But if we're also going to do a few songs before or a few songs after, we don't know yet. But whatever it's going to be, it's gonna be great. We may just come out and do the full album, and after that do some hits. The album's only an hour long, so we're obviously going to have to do something. If you guys want me up there dancing naked after the set,” he jokes, bursting into laughter while Drum shudders at the portly axeman's suggestion. “You're like... 'No, no',” he laughs. “Some people are like, 'Yeah, I want to see that'.”