THIS WEEK IN CLEVELAND

The Machine's New Soul
Fear Factory return with their best album in 15 years

It's weird how the wheel of cultural relevance spins. In the early to mid-'90s, Fear Factory's blend of militaristic/industrial rhythm and thrash-metal rawness—not to mention their highly conceptual lyrical vision of a nightmarish war between men and machines—was the sound of the future.

Albums like 1992's Soul of a New Machine and 1995's Demanufacture welded mechanistic riffing and live drumming (which sounded programmed) to death-metal growls and anthemic choruses—both courtesy of singer Burton Bell, whose range allowed Fear Factory to combine the sounds of Ministry, Napalm Death, and Judas Priest into one band. The group toured with Sepultura, Cannibal Corpse, and Biohazard, revealing the broad-based appeal of its sound.

As the 1990s wore on, Fear Factory opened Megadeth and Iron Maiden tours and secured a slot at Ozzfest. Their blend of harsh and clean vocals, plus their lack of guitar solos, showed up as stylistic tropes on numerous nü-metal albums. Bands like Disturbed, Static-X, and Coal Chamber all made their debt to Fear Factory explicit, citing them in interviews and liner notes. But within the band, all wasn't well. Following the release of the fourth Fear Factory album, 2001's Digimortal, Bell quit, agreeing to return only after founding guitarist Dino Cazares was forced out.

With Cazares gone, bassist Christian Olde Wolbers moved to guitar, and Strapping Young Lad bass player Byron Stroud was hired. This lineup released two albums, 2004's Archetype and 2005's Transgression, which weren't exactly beloved by longtime fans, particularly the latter (for starters, it included an odd cover of U2's "I Will Follow"). The band's time seemed to have passed, as screamo and other, newer sounds replaced industrial metal. Fear Factory dissolved in 2006, after Bell joined Ministry for that group's farewell album, The Last Sucker, and Wolbers and drummer Raymond Herrera formed Arkaea. And that was that—until last year.

"I still laugh about this every day," says Cazares. "Obviously, I was out of the band for a few years because me and Burton didn't get along. And the power shifted when I left the band. Raymond was basically running Fear Factory. And he hired Christian's wife, who had no managerial experience, to be the manager. And Raymond was having an affair with Christian's wife."

Wait, what?

"Burton's like, 'OK, this is stupid. We need to fire her, and we need to get a real manager.' He goes, 'I don't care if you guys are fucking her, but she can't manage this band.'"

The way Cazares tells it, Bell wanted to get the group's classic lineup back together, but the rhythm section, bonded as they were by their mutual love for the bassist's wife and their mutual hatred of their former guitarist, wouldn't budge. "They didn't want me back in the band, and they didn't wanna fire her," he says. Bell eventually had to take sides, and he did. "Burton said, 'If you guys don't wanna be a part of it, fuck you. I'm gonna move on with Dino.' So that's when the whole legal battle started between me and Burton and the two other guys. And we have a record out, so that tells you how that worked out."

Based on the evidence of the brand-new Mechanize, it worked out very well. Stroud returned on bass and, at his suggestion, Gene Hoglan joined on drums. (Stroud and Hoglan worked together in Tenet, Zimmers Hole, and Devin Townsend's industrial power-thrash outfit Strapping Young Lad.) And the record, easily the band's strongest in 15 years, has been rapturously received by metal fans.

While the two duos—Bell/Cazares and Stroud/Hoglan—joining forces could have dragged Fear Factory in a new, more death-metal direction, that hasn't happened. Cazares credits Hoglan's adaptability—he's played with more than a dozen bands, including Death, Testament, Dark Angel, and cartoon metallers Dethklok.

But there have been a few minor changes to Fear Factory's sonic template on this latest upgrade. The most notable is the band's first-ever guitar solo in "Fear Campaign."

"We were trying to make a statement that we didn't want to be the typical metal band with guitar solos everywhere," says Cazares.

The key to Fear Factory's success in 2010 is making all the pieces fit. Cazares and Bell fit together creatively once again, and Stroud and Hoglan are the musical equivalent of universal blood donors—they can be slotted in anywhere. With a combination of elements this strong, the future of Fear Factory looks a lot more optimistic than it does in the band's bleak, dystopian sci-fi lyrics.

POLE POSITION

Behemoth aren't just your everyday, run-of-the-mill death-metal band
[From the Cleveland Scene]

A lot of death metal is interchangeable — and that's coming from a fan of the genre. But there's no mistaking Behemoth. The Polish trio spent the last dozen years, roughly since 1999's Satanica and 2000's Thelema.6, trying to engulf the world in the sonic equivalent of a firestorm. Drummer Zbigniew Robert Prominski, a.k.a. "Inferno," plays some of the most powerful blast beats in death metal, hammering at the snare like he's firing a chain gun, as the double kick drums knock holes into your skull. Meanwhile, singer-guitarist Adam "Nergal" Darski fires off ferocious guitar riffs that trade the typical death-metal rhythmic grinding for a more anthemic, relentlessly destructive sound — he's going for overwhelming power from first note to last, and often comes closer to Psalm 69-era Ministry than, say, Cannibal Corpse.

But Darksi's vocals really get your attention. He avoids the typical extreme-metal guttural croak/bark, instead ranting and roaring like a blast furnace. It's such a distinctive, almost inhuman sound that the obvious question is what kind of effects pedal does he use to achieve it?

"What you can hear is pretty much my voice," he says. "Sometimes I just double it or triple it. That's how you get the impression that there's a few people screaming."

Darski believes there are a lot of misconceptions about Behemoth. One of the major ones is that the group made a major stylistic shift in 2000, abandoning the black metal of its first three albums in favor of a more death-metal sound. "Our style has been evolving throughout the years; every record is different," he asserts with some accuracy. "I wouldn't really say that after Thelema.6 we changed. If you listen to each one of our nine albums, each one is different. It's constant evolution."

This constant evolution is particularly surprising given that the current lineup — with Inferno on drums and Tomasz "Orion" Wróblewski on bass — has been together since 2003 (Inferno's actually been drumming for Behemoth since 1997).

"Because we've written so much music, it's more and more difficult to come up with something that's gonna be Behemoth style at the same time that it's fresh and challenging," says Darski. "We can't just get in a rehearsal room and throw ideas at each other and the song comes out. It's a much longer and more painful process."

For this reason, he has decided it's important to make each Behemoth album a statement. This means abandoning a longstanding practice of releasing EPs of B-sides, live tracks and cover songs between albums. One of these five- or six-track releases has followed every Behemoth disc since Thelema.6, and the range of covers Behemoth has essayed over the years is surprising, to say the least. They've offered their own roaring take on other extreme metal bands' work (Morbid Angel's "Day of Suffering," Mayhem's "Carnage," Venom's "Welcome to Hell"), but they've also released versions of David Bowie's "Hello Spaceboy," Nine Inch Nails' "Wish" and the Ramones' "I'm Not Jesus." But no more.

"There's gonna be no more small releases; it just makes no sense," says Darksi. "I want people to wait for another album. I want them to anticipate — to be really, really hungry for the next Behemoth opus. I don't want to distract their hunger with a small release. We will release a DVD, but that's a different story. There will be no musical release from Behemoth this year or in 2011."

Two years should be just about long enough to absorb the band's most recent album. Evangelion came out in August and topped many metal critics' year-end lists. It's not as florid or ambitious as 2004's Demigod, which featured synths simulating an orchestra and a male choir, but it contains some of the most powerful songs the band has ever written. "Alas, the Lord Is Upon Me" finds Darski combining the black-metal spirit of the band's early days with the ultra-aggressive blasting of their more recent work, while the doom-haunted "Ov Fire and the Void" is possibly the slowest song in their discography. Meanwhile, the album's epic closing track, "Lucifer," uses a poem by Polish poet Tadeusz Miciski as its lyrics.

That's a surprising gesture on Darski's part. He's tended to ignore his homeland's culture, preferring to write songs employing imagery from various ancient lands, including Babylon (Nergal, his stage name, was a Babylonian deity) and other Middle Eastern countries. But as he makes very clear, it's always metaphorical.

"We're not Nile, we're not Absu, we're not Melechesh," he says, citing other extreme metal bands who make the ancient desert tribes their primary subject matter. "We write about our lives, our perspectives, our point of view. We just wrap it up in this Biblical ancient stuff."

Part of that desire to look outside may be rooted in Behemoth's relative obscurity in Poland — which is ironic since Darski is engaged to Dorota "Doda" Rabczewska, one of Poland's biggest female pop stars.

"She's big, she's a star," he says. "We're just an extreme-metal band who happen to be recognized by a larger audience. But our music is anti-mainstream, basically. You can sell a certain amount of records, and this is it. We've sold 15,000 records in Poland, and I don't really think it's going to be easy to surpass those numbers. We can't do much better than that. But we'll see — maybe I'm wrong."