Album Review: Fear Factory - The Industrialist

It's been 14 years since the release of Obsolete, the epic third chapter to the Fear Factory saga. Then they stood atop their game, arguably improving with every album, and things looked promising for the future. Utopian tomorrows, however, were never a part of the Fear Factory narrative. As the clouds overhead began to darken with the release of the follow-up Digimortal, the dystopia of their dreams began to invade their reality, signalling the demise of the band as we knew it. From there on the release of each new album was an affair with disappointment, and the prolonged dismay led many to all but abandon hope.

Enter The Industrialist. The conceptual scene is set, on the stunning title track and opener, as looped samples and spoken-word head a mounting crescendo, which detonates into a fury of controlled riffs and mechanical blast beats that are systematically scrutinised by a scanning synth beam. Recharger and Messiah both hit their mark with a precision that's as equally admirable, before a Holloween (Theme)-like melody on keys raises God Eater and showcases an exciting emergence of evolution in the creative camp. Like clockwork, the chords keep striking home right 'til the end of Human Augmentation; a nine-minute soundtrack of industrialised ambiance and mechanised spoken-word that brings the album and narrative to a devastating close in what is possibly one of the greater moments in Fear Factory's whole catalogue.

All the parts are so perfectly in place that The Industrialist figuratively affects a transportation to a time and place that would never give way to the prospect of the band's post-'90s nightmare. Fear Factory's fourth chapter has finally arrived!