FEAR FACTORY

Obsolete (Roadrunner)

THERE ARE some bands who were manifestly put on earth to make one great album, promote it for a few months, and then bugger off. Fear Factory, unfortunately, have cheated themselves out of their destiny.

The world would have been no poorer had this LA grindcore quartet sold off their equipment after their stunning 1992 debut, Soul Of A New Machine; so brutally pared-down and nihilistic that it was perhaps the last truly great metal record ever made. Perhaps it was beginners’ luck, especially considering what they’ve done since: two excruciatingly self-parodic follow-ups in the intervening six years. Here’s another.

This, in four succinct instalments, is what you can expect from Obsolete:

1. A better writer than I would no doubt say that it sounds like a juggernaut committing suicide, but I’ll settle for commenting that it’s extremely noisy and a bit too chaotic for its own good.

2. It displays a typically pedantic and painstaking approach to its production, to the extent that they’ve evidently spent five times longer working on the right guitar sound than on any other aspect of the record.

3. The lyrics address the issue of bogus class warfare, with repeated references to “them”. “They”, presumably, being the capitalist pigs who control the world in a giant conspiracy that, among other things, stops Fear Factory from realising their birthright of playing to packed stadia.

4. The singer, Burton C Bell, continuously oscillates between a bellowing roar and a wavering, self-consciously “ethereal” contralto, which results in two bad vocalists for the price of one.

Without the shock of the new that accompanied their first album, Fear Factory sound remorselessly self-parodic and unwieldy. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to them that there are better things for a bunch of 27-year-old men to be doing than writing songs with titles like ‘Edgecrusher’, ‘Securitron’ and ‘Hi-Tech Hate’.

Obsolete is triumphantly unlistenable – not even in an interesting way – and staggeringly pointless even by these boys’ standards. Buy it for someone you despise.

Jonathan O’Brien