Dino Cazares Reflects on Fear Factory’s Influence on Modern Bands
Some bands just help define a genre. Their sound was like no other and countless younger acts either knowingly or unknowingly bite off their style. One man who thinks his band has helped mold an entire genre into something more is none other than Fear Factory‘s own Dino Cazares.
During a recent interview with Black Shadows Media, Cazares took a look back at how he says his band helped shape the careers of a number of acts out there.
“Well, I definitely feel that back in the ’90s when Fear Factory first came out, that we definitely did have an influence in this genre we call metal. And I say metal as a whole, not the subgenres. But definitely we influenced a lot of bands like Static-X and many other bands after that.
“But I also feel that we’ve influenced a lot of bands to add melodic vocals, ’cause at the time when we first came out in 1990, there wasn’t really a lot of bands doing that. In fact, I can’t think of any band that was doing that. So to combine the heavy vocals and the melodic vocals, even death growls and melodic vocals, there wasn’t anybody doing that. I feel that Fear Factory definitely influenced that to a lot of different genres of metal.”
According to Cazares, one of the key features of Fear Factory and how they write their music comes from the biggest metal band in the world — Metallica.
“Also, the syncopated guitars with the kick drums, that was something that I heard way back when Metallica did it in the song ‘One’. They only did it for a second. I decided to start a whole theory about that with my band. I brought that whole thing into my band to make it the band. Everything that we did was all syncopated — almost everything. So that was something that we wanted to create and keep in our band, which was able to influence a lot of people to do that as well.”
The band’s more brutal sound, especially early on, caused some serious problems with record labels. Thanks to their heavier sound, they found it difficult to get a deal, Cazares said.
“The first time somebody heard our stuff, they were, like, ‘This is not original.’ I’m, like, ‘Okay. Why?’ I was asking myself why. So we went back to the drawing board. The thing about the band when we first started was, like, ‘Okay. We’ve gotta make music. We’ve gotta just keep recording and just keep stuff going.’
“So the first demo we did was three songs, the second one was seven songs, the third one was sixteen songs. That’s a lot of songs. So we just went back to the drawing board and just kept recording and recording and recording and trying to perfect our sound and trying to create something original. It wasn’t until that one lucky break that we got that somebody actually said, ‘Yes.’ The guy felt like… The reason why he signed us is ’cause he felt that we were doing something different. In our genre, at the time in the ’90s, a lot of the music was pretty aggressive, for our genre.
“The death metal and grindcore scene was massive. Bands that you probably never heard of, like Napalm Death and Morbid Angel, were really big. So we were trying to come up in that scene, but stand out at the same time. So our vocals were very aggressive, heavy stuff, and all of a sudden, we had these beautiful, melodic vocals, [and] a lot of record companies were, like, ‘What the…?’ Even record company guys were saying, ‘What the fuck is this? We don’t want this. We don’t look at this as a product we could sell.’
“So it took that one guy, the one A&R guy, to really believe in what we were doing and saw the future of the band. And it took him to go back to the owner of his record company and say, ‘Look, this is the future right here. This band is the future.’ And, of course, the rest is history.”
Fear Factory are currently working on their first new album with their new singer Milo Silvestro. It should be out sometime next year sometime.
