Like everybody, I got a good laugh from CBS L.A. news correspondent Serene Branson’s gibberish-packed meltdown/report from the Grammys in February (watch it here). But unlike most, I understood exactly what she meant by “heavy burtation.” It may have been seizure-induced mouth mutiny, but it’s a term that I wish existed back in 1998 when I interviewed Fear Factory frontman Burton C. Bell about their then-new, very burtatious record Obsolete. Over twenty minutes, I lauded his icy clean singing, his dystopian themes, and his big-balls performances on side B’s smashing (and alliterative) openers, “Hi-Tech Hate” and “Freedom Or Fire” (best FF jam ever, here). I pointed out that his vocals bound and accented the album’s ripping single-note riffs, mushrooming chords, and uber-violent snare drum. I blabbed at length about Obsolete’s intra-album dynamics, i.e. the way its snappy, pressurized first half sets up the crush and dispersal of its second half. But what a waste of breath, cuz here in 2011, we have a term to express all of those things: Heavy fuckin’ Burtation.

-ADF

Get heavily Burt-ated with Burton C. Bell & Fear Factory on tour starting June 1 in Tempe.

I really only know Johnny Orlando, Jr., because of the work he’s done with Metal Injection, but plenty of people have told me I’m an idiot for not paying closer attention to him. And based on the below video, in which Johnny Orlando , Jr., Jr. asks members of Fear Factory, Misery Index, Revocation and Carnifex that all-important question: “Where do babies come from?”

Kudos to Burton C. Bell for trying to give the kid an honest answer, although Gene Hoglan’s response is clearly the best. Reader Xavier Luxenburg suggests that the absence of a certain guitar player is “confirmation” of his baby eating, but I think that dude actually likes ‘em a little younger than this kid.

-AR

Thanks to everyone who sent this in.

On Wednesday we posted a video of a dude proposing to his girlfriend on-stage at a recent Fear Factory concert. I really thought that that was the first and last time the subject would ever come up, but, lo and behold, yesterday afternoon I actually got an e-mail from the guy – his name is Charley Ray, as it turns out, and his fiancée’s name is Alexis – saying “I never thought I’d get ‘coverage’ on the proposal…. We had a good time and it was unbelievably cool that Fear Factory let me do that.”

Of course, such a marriage proposal is, um, unusual, to put it mildly, so I needed to know more. And Charles was cool enough to grant me a quick e-mail interview. After the jump, learn all the ins and outs of this most bizarre story.

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Say what you will about Fear Factory – you’re probably correct. Their faux-industrial flourishes of synths are ignorable at best and ridiculous at worst, Dino Cazares’ stop-start riffs blend together after a song or two, their sci-fi themes cover the spectrum of cheesy to horribly cringe-worthy, Burton C. Bell’s singing sounds like Justin Broadrick’s slow brother moaning in a karaoke contest, that their whole approach could be interpreted as watered down extreme metal for the Hot Topic goth set… they’re all pretty apt if they’re not a band you grew up with (I’m looking at you, Axl Q. Rosenberg). But say you’re sixteen years old, the oldest sibling and cousin on both sides of your parents’ families, don’t have any cool uncles with Overkill patches on their denim jackets or exhaustive NWOBHM collections, don’t have any friends that are into Cannibal Corpse or Slayer or Napalm Death (or a whole lot of friends at all, really), and your parents bond over their love for James Taylor. You can’t just go from zero to Carcass. Thus, bands like Fear Factory exist: to ease the transition between Nine Inch Nails and the wealth of perverted delight death, black, and doom metal have to offer. For that reason and really that reason alone, I can never hate on Fear Factory. They don’t stand up to a lot of scrutiny, but they do what they do well, and serve as an excellent gateway into extreme metal for the unsure and uninitiated. From Fear Factory I moved to Slipknot’s first album, and from there I moved to Reign in Blood. From there, it was all downhill very, very fast.

So I was delighted to hear that Dino had waddled his way back into the FF fold; admittedly, the only thing that kept me from completely hating (as opposed to just mostly hating) Divine Heresy was Cazares’ riffing, even if it did have a tendency to grow stale in that confines of that shitty, shitty band. I stopped following Fear Factory with Digimortal (B-Real guest verse = I’m all set with your band. That even goes for Outkast, as far as I’m concerned.) and have since only thrown Demanufacture or Obsolete on every now and again for some healthy nostalgia. I’ve obviously moved on to heavier and/or more esoteric metal, and thus didn’t need the band anymore to satisfy my heaviness quotient. And oddly enough, Mechanize, the band’s reboot after two Dino-less records, is an album exactly for that audience: while still undoubtedly a Fear Factory album, for better or worse, it’s full of embellishments those familiar with and fond of metal outside the realm of Fear Factory will recognize. In doing so, the band may have made the most satisfying album of their career, and quite possibly their heaviest. Though half the original lineup is gone, the spirit remains the same, if not drastically improved.

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In no particular order…

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It’s been a while since we’ve reported on the current Fear Factory drama because, well, it got boring re-hashing the same old shit over and over again just to get you guys all hot and bothered in the comments (whoops, did I just say that?). To summarize, in case you didn’t read this site missed out over the summer: Dino re-friends Burton Bell and the two start working on new music under the “Fear Factory” name, while Christian and Raymond — currently working on their Arkaea project — rightly object because Fear Factory is supposedly a four-way partnership. Lawsuits and public shit-talking ensue.

Last I checked a resolution between the two warring Fear Factions hadn’t been reached. So either the four men have settled, or Dino and Burton — let’s just call them the baby-eating Fear Faction — just don’t give a fuck. The baby-eating Fear Faction, along with latter-day FF cohorts Byron Stroud [Strapping Young Lad] and Gene Hoglan [Strapping Young Lad, Dethklok, every fucking band ever] — just announced that they have a new album called Mechanized coming out on February 9th via Candlelight Records (!?!).

The new song “Powershifter” has been making the Internet rounds all weekend; stream it below. Unsurprisingly, it sounds a lot like Fear Factory. I imagine some of you will love it and some of you will hate it; place me firmly in the “meh” camp. I loves me some Demanufcature and Obsolete, but 10 years later there are tons of metal bands out there that are way better, more interesting, and more worthy of my listening time.

-VN

Burton C. Bell has remained pretty quiet on the whole Fear Factory situation up until now, but the good folks at  Rock My Monkey have finally gotten him to open up and do some shit-talkin’ of his own. It’s an audio interview, but Mr. Blabbermouth has transcribed some key portions…

…which I’m not even going to re-print here. Because it’s mostly anti-climatic. But I’ll give you the short version: Bell’s side of the story is that during the mixing of the Dino-less FF offering Transgression, Christian Olde Wolbers started having an affair with the band’s manager, Christy Priske. And I guess things got pretty serious, ’cause the two are married now. Bell found Wolbers and Priske’s shitting where they eat as “completely unacceptable,” and things got worse when Priske, Wolbers and Raymond Herrera allegedly brought Bell some new business arrangement which he also disliked. And then things really fell to shit: Bell says he refused to work with Priske, Wolbers and Herrera refused to let her go and refused to reunite with Dino, and now we have all this fun mud slinging in a public forum.

But here’s the part of the interview I actually found really interesting, and this part I will re-print verbatim:

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Divine Heresy get a lot of somewhat undeserved hate: calling the band out for not being very good would be like calling this writer out for not hitting .458 for the Dodgers. This isn’t to say that the band necessarily deserve defense; in fact, I can’t imagine a solid argument for their existence. But their brand of technical nu-deathcore works surprisingly well, in that it’s not so much awful as it is awfully bland. And while perhaps it’s not fair to commend a band for not being as terrible as they could be, it’s not fair to decry them for not being amazing. If you were expecting them to be a slightly edgier Fear Factory, Bringer of Plagues, their latest album, delivers exactly what you’d think: 42 minutes (strangely enough, to the second) of surgically precise mechanical riffs, big yet terribly obvious grooves, pretty bad nu-metalcore vocals, and nothing particularly memorable.

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“Will someone please tell Dino that his lunch has arrived?”

Holy shit. This is officially my favorite feud of the year.

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Sometimes we don’t want to face the truth about a certain situation. But sooner or later, you always have to be honest with yourself, or face a big ol’ ass whoopin’.

The reunited-but-not-really Fear Factory, which features original members Dino Cazares and Burton C. Bell but NOT Christian Olde Wolbers or Raymond Herrera, has apparently had to cancel not only what was to be their debut performance in Spain last night, but an entire German tour due to the ongoing legal battle over the band’s name.

Really, you have to wonder how the fuck it got this far that the group booked an entire tour without anyone checking if they had the legal rights to the name. Here’s my best guess about how the conversation between Dino Cazares and Burton C. Bell must’ve went:

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Quick re-cap: first original Fear Factory members Dino Cazares and Burton C. Bell announced they were teaming up with non-original Fear Factory member Byron Stroud and never-a-Fear Factory member Gene Hoglan to start a band that would not be called Fear Factory.

Several weeks later the band announced that they would be called Fear Factory.

Now our pal Anso DF at Hipsters Out of Metal! is reporting that original Fear Factory drummer Raymond Herrera told some radio show that nu-Fear Factory can’t be called Fear Factory no’ mo’:

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Twenty days ago it was announced that Burton C. Bell and Dino Cazares would be joining forces for a new project with Gene Hoglan and Byron Stroud; at the time, I wondered why the hell what is basically a Fear Factory reunion wasn’t going to be called Fear Factory.

Well, turns out it will be called Fear Factory.

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I was never a big Fear Factory person so someone please feel free to correct me if I’m wrong, but did anyone ever really care about any of the members of that band who weren’t Burton C. Bell or Dino Cazares?

I ask because after about a year of speculation that the original Factory would be reuniting, it’s been announced that, yes, Bell and Cazares will now be working together again – but as a new band with a different, still to be determined name.

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According to the “status” post on Fear Factory’s MySpace, the band will have a “New Album and World Tour in 2009!”

I guess this was inevitable, despite Burton C. Bell’s claims when we interviewed him a few months back that he doesn’t even like metal. Whatwith the Divine Heresy soap opera, the relative failure (commercially) of Bell’s Ascension of the Watchers, the rest of the dudes doing God knows what, and reports of Burton and Dino kissing and making nice at a show in LA a few weeks ago (I can’t find the source, but I remember reading that they chatted), the time seems ripe for an FF reunion.* I’d think there will be plenty of interest too, judging by the fervency of Fear Factory fans who comment on our site.

-VN

*After I published this article, Axl pointed out to me that this news does not necessarily mean that Dino is back in the band. Good point.

A few weeks ago I was offered the opportunity to sit down and talk with Ascension of Watchers and ex-Fear Factory frontman Burton C. Bell, a chance I jumped at right away. Bell was quite the gentleman, sitting through a long interview and answering my questions about the new Ascension of the Watchers album Numinosum (read my review here), his past career with Fear Factory, working with Al Jourgensen of Ministry, and a whole lot of other topics. The full chat transcript, after the jump.*

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Iann Robinson at None Louder is reporting that Divine Heresy broke-up on stage at this past weekend’s New England Metal & Hardcore Festival:

“From what was being spread around the monitors were out and vocalist Tommy Vext couldn’t hear himself. After eight songs and fearing his voice might blow Vext requested the band cut the set short. Ex-Fear Factory member Dino Cazares shoved Vext and a physical altercation ensued. As far as we know the band is no more but that could change.”

There’s been no official statement from the band or their label, and everything looks hunky dory on the band’s MySpace page; still, we consider Robinson a very reliable source, so I’m inclined to believe that this is real.

I’m sure that Fear Factory fans will celebrate this news as evidence that a full-on FF reunion is in the works (especially after Dino was spotted hanging out with Burton C. Bell a few weeks ago). Still, even if Divine Heresy were to break up, I’d hope it would be in a somewhat more amicable manner than this; when we interviewed the band back in November, they seemed like genuinely nice dudes who were really enjoying working together, and for former bouncer/security guard Vext, getting to front Dino’s new band must have seemed like winning the lottery.

Divine Heresy are suppposed to kick off their next U.S. tour May 9 in Philly; presumably we’ll get some kind of official word before then.

-AR