I guess some metal dudes are annoyed by neo-thrash metal bands like Warbringer, Mantic Ritual, and Municipal Waste. No scene is fun for everyone, so whatever, to each his own and all that. But even if Whorebanger, Spandex Ritual, and Munificent Waste make music of no appeal to your fun-hating ear, frankly, I still insist that you acknowledge their value to metal as a genre. First, each makes music that sounds like five guys making music, which feels great when you’re overwhelmed by metal that sounds like the universe collapsing onto itself (SYL, Emperor), a jet landing in your eye socket (Hate Eternal, Minus’ Jesus Christ Bobby), or mankind’s overthrow by fridge-raiding Nazi robots from the future (Fear Factory). Of course, I love that enormity in metal, especially when it’s the expression of an awareness of Earth’s microscopic significance in the universe. But sometimes it’s more fun to just rock out with a bunch of heshers. That’s good thrash metal. It sounds great at the beach.

And a second and unexpected side effect of neo-thrash’s artistic and commercial successes is their impact on other metal bands. This is all conjecture and surmise, but Municipal Waste’s records are big winners, and now we got a goddamn fucking D.R.I. reunion tour to enjoy. And isn’t it reasonable to conclude that Warbringer’s success would provide a shot of confidence and vigor to elder thrash bands, like fucking awesome Overkill? If you’ve heard their excellent 238th record, Ironbound, you know it’s all energetic and snappy metal (normal for them), but also that it’s their most unabashedly thrashy record in forever. And few deserve wallet-love as much as Overkill, who, contrary to their name, exemplify the unpretentious hesher approach. (See The Years Of Decay‘s “I Hate” which features gang vocals that sound like six dirtballs hollering out the back of a van, not a million-strong army of angry mutant outcasts, like say “Hook In Mouth” by Megadeth.) Big sales or not, Overkill did their part and made a metal record to be reckoned with. For this, we can thank the best neo-thrash bands and fans. For the best parts of neo-thrash, we can thank Overkill.

-ADF

MARCH IS METAL MONTH IS UNDERWAY!!! And as Vince promised last week, there’s a free sampler now avail featuring artists from many of the participating labels. That means you can download tracks by Fear Factory, Ihsahn, Triptykon, Suicide Silence, Lacuna Coil, Queensryche, White Wizzard, and more, all for the cost of breathing. Head over to Amazon to get the absolutely free download.

We’ll also have lots more March is Metal Month goodness in the coming weeks, including additional interviews and contests. Keep checking back here, or head over to MarchIsMetalMonth.com for all the latest.

Apparently Sade has a new hit record and scored the #1 record last week. Who knew? Good for her… Sade’s pretty rad. I know at least one death metal dude who will be REALLY psyched to hear this news.

But I’m guessing you all care more about the new High on Fire record. Let’s find out how that and other metal and hard rock releases charted last week after the jump.

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Though much lauded by critics, Fear Factory’s Mechanize served mainly to remind me that the bifurcated band — reuniting vocalist Burton Bell and guitarist Dino Cazares with a brand new rhythm section — had neglected to make any real progress from 1995′s Demanufacture. Indeed, fifteen years later, Bell and Cazares appear content to rest on their laurels, assuredly to the delight of many of the band’s nostalgic fans who have long yearned for a so-called “return to form.” And while industrial metal fell out of favor Stateside some time back (not long before nu-metal began to outstay its own welcome here), over in Europe the sound has carried on, if not exactly moved on. Accordingly, many of those originally drawn to industrial music by the breakout sounds of Fear Factory, Ministry, or Nine Inch Nails have long since abandoned the messy scene for more niche subgenres (power noise comes to mind) or other music altogether. This is why, as one who’s all but given up on industrial in recent years, I have quickly come to love Shining‘s Blackjazz.

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So let’s say you’re Fear Factory. You’re in the headlines a lot these days because your founding guitar player has returned to the fold and you’ve recorded an album that ranks with your best. You have to go do your first big U.S. comeback tour. Who do you announce as your support acts? How about Winds of Plague, Dirge Within, and Periphery?

Wait… what?

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My car just got towed and I’m pissed. Really fucking pissed. One side effect of being a pantsless blogger is that sometimes you get a little comfortable and forget to do things like move your car when you’re supposed to (and I swear, I didn’t poke any smot today!). Before I go pay $185 to get my shitty fucking 1988 Honda Accord back, I’ll recap what happened this week on MetalSucks. Fuck the world.

• You say to-MAY-to, I say to-MAH-to… when it comes to band names.
• We debuted a fresh track by Dangers.
• Trivium canned drummer Travis Smith causing you all to argue incessantly about the tr00/false metalness of Trivium. Oceano also lost a member, causing the MetalSucks Mansion to rejoice while Suarez wept in the corner. Meanwhile Periphery’s ex-singer joined a band that sounds just like Periphery and even includes one of their [key] members.
• We spoke with Ihsahn and invited all of you to speak with Dark Tranquillity’s Mikael Stanne.
• Atreyu’s drummer’s wife wants to save rock and roll but apparently doesn’t want to save correct usage of the French language.
• Sammy O’Hagar likee Fear Factory. Axl Rosenberg no likee Fear Factory.
• Eyal is conducting an experiment. Have fun sifting through 385 demos, buddy.
• White Wizzard released the best video ever of the week.

Bye.

-VN

Somone is inevitably going to read the critique I am about to write of Fear Factory’s new video, “Fear Campaign,” and write off everything I say as the ramblings of a Jew who is overly sensitive about the use of Nazi imagery. If you are that person, congratulations, you’re an imbecile and I think you’d be much more comfortable reading this website instead.

Now, onto the video…

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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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So apparently Ozzfest is coming back this summer, and is coming back as a traveling tour again (as opposed to the one-off fest it was in 2008). And that’s all well and good, only… who’s gonna be on the bill?

Mayhem, which is basically Ozzfest 2.0, has already scooped up a lot of big-name bands for the summer, including many who have played multiple past Ozzfests – namely Korn, Rob Zombie, Lamb of God, Atreyu, Shadows Fall and Hatebreed, the latter of whom I think have been on something like 90% of all Ozzfests ever.

Add to that other Ozzfest alum like Chimaira, In This Moment and Norma Jean, and some bands the kids today all seem to like, such as Winds of Plague and They Who Shall Not Be Named, and, well, that’s a whole bunch of potential mainstage and second stage draws right there.

Then there’s the mini-fests like Summer Slaughter. I can’t tell you which bands we already know are booked for some of these tours without betraying a lot of people’s confidence, but I can tell you that some great bands are now no longer available for Ozzfest.

And, oh yeah, Megadeth, Slayer, and Testament are now doing their American Carnage tour in the summer, so they’re out.

So who’s left? After the jump, I’m going to play my favorite game: it’s called “over-think about something incredibly unimportant.”

Before we proceed, it’s worth noting that I’m going to try and be semi-realistic when moving forward with some barely-educated guesses about who’ll be playing Ozzfest. If a band already has summer tour dates booked, I’m going to assume they’re not avail, although I acknowledge that they could cancel those dates in favor of playing for a bigger crowd. And I’m not even going to bother with bands like Pig Destroyer, Sigh, and Salome – bands that will play Ozzfest right around the time Joey Belladonna’s solo band plays four sold-out headlining shows at Giants Stadium. Also, obviously not all of these bands are gonna end up on the bill – these are just bands I think could end up there.

And so, without further bullshit…

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I have always wanted to like Fear Factory as much as people tell me I should. And I thought that Demanufacture was pretty okay. But mostly, I just getbored listening to Fear Factory. It all just kind of blends together for me.

And so it goes with Mechanize. Last week a friend told me that she doesn’t really like Fear Factory, either, and she thinks the album is super; so I listened for a second time. Nope. Doin’ nothing for me. And now I’m listening as I type this. Boy, that Gene Hoglan sure can play the drums, huh? I think he has a real future ahead of him.

Look. It’s not terrible. I just don’t get why people think it’s so great.

Mechanize comes out February 9 on Candlelight, but it is now streaming in full here (but only if you have a Facebook account… blurgh). Give it a listen, and then tell me why I’m an idiot for not seeing the genius of this album. And next week, Sammy O’Hagar should have a thoughtful review from a person who actually understands this band.

-AR

The other night over beers some friends and I were saying it would be great if we could run a “Win a Signed Baby from Dino Cazares” contest on MetalSucks, wherein readers would submit their best recipes for babies, and the winner would get, y’know, a baby signed by Dino. It would be the best contest ever.

Obviously that’s never gonna happen ’cause adoption laws are real strict and shit, but The Gauntlet have come up with the next best thing – the “What is Dino Eating?” contest:

I was going through the audio from my Fear Factory interview with guitarist Dino Cazares and came across this sound bite and became curious as to what Dino might possibly be eating during the interview. Post your guess in the comments and the person with the best guess will get a Gauntlet shirt. In Dino’s defense, my interviews tend to run long with people I find interesting.

I don’t know how long the interview could have possibly run that Dino couldn’t wait – I mean, it’s not like their plane crashed and they were stranded in the mountains or something – but, hey, I applaud The Gauntlet’s ingenuity in designing this contest. Between that and the “Top Ten Rivalries Involving Dave Mustaine” list they published recently, I’d say they’re on a roll.

-AR

Okay. I started SYL in 1993 after hearing Soul Of A New Machine. I saw Fear Factory open for Sepultura with Clutch, and I remember running around the venue telling everyone: “THAT is what I want to do, except with extra chaos…”

My creative process is directly tied to my emotional development. There are some folks that make music by picking up a guitar until they have a riff that is defined by the musical roads they choose to hone. They then sculpt it into that framework and voila, Metallica, Slayer, Priest etc. I think that’s awesome, and in some ways I’m envious of that. In many cases, if you mix that with tenacity and a certain amount of talent and luck, you can sustain a decent career.

That’s not how I create, again… as it is tied to life and circumstance, my music has generally been cathartic observations of what life presents, and each new record in many ways is a reaction to the one before. So in the most blunt of terms, I make music to better understand myself as I change.

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Today was Friday the 13th, but absolutely nothing bad happened to me. I mean, the night is young so shit could still go horribly awry I suppose, but all in all, I had a pretty good day – nay, I had a pretty good week. If only the same could be said for the world of metal. Here’s some disasters the plagued various musicians this week:

• Slash completed his decade-long indoctrination into the Metallica “Fuck Our Fans” Club.
• We’re not sure if Steven Tyler is still in Aerosmith or not, but we are sure that we don’t give a fuck either way.
• There was a lot of controversy over a really, really ugly painting.
• No can explain to me why I should care about Alter Bridge.
• Fear Faction ate s’more babies, released a new song.
• R.I.P. Jerry Fuchs.

And, oh yeah, some good news: MetalSucks is going to do a digital release of The Binary Code’s Suspension of Disbelief on December 15 for just five bucks! Get stoked.

Alright. I’m off to go hear Vince spin. Have a nice weekend everyone. Next week we have another extra, super-duper special surprise for you…

-AR

If you can tell me which of the following is the cover art for the new album by Fear Factory – or the baby-eating Fear Faction, or C&B Music Factory, or whatever the fuck we’re going to refer to them as from now on – then you care too much.

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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

I’m not just speaking in the general sense. I mean, in this video, he announces “I’ve got something for all you,” then lets one rip.

What do you think that smelled like? I’d guess half-digested babies.

-AR

Thanks to Manfred Nuggets for the link.

Extreme-kin Park.

(two out of five horns)

[Corey Mitchell (AKA "The Old Fart") is a best-selling true crime author, founder of the #1 true crime blog, In Cold Blog, and sad about the recent death of my friend and fellow true crime author, Dale Hudson. RIP.]

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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I don’t know if Willie Gardner is officially associated with a band known as The Douche Lords or not, but he has their name in his e-mail address and sent me a link to the band’s MySpace page this morning.

Why is this band of interest? As it turns out, they were Dino Cazares’ first band (In case ya haven’t figured it out by now, that’s Dino above).

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