Fear Factory: The Best of Fear Factory

One of the most admired and innovative extreme metal bands of the last 15 years finally has their own "best of" package, but the only catch is this collection contains just songs from their time with Roadrunner Records. Most fans who have followed the band all these years will no doubt already own these songs, so there's really no reason to knock yourself out and get this, but if you are new to the world of Fear Factory, this is a pretty good place to start, as you get a nice sampling of the band's sound as it evolved through the years. The first few songs are from the album Soul of a New Machine, which was pretty extreme and radical when it was first released in 1992, as it combined the styles of death metal and industrial like no band had ever done previously. Highlight here is the bludgeoning "Martyr", as well as "Scapegoat", both of which are longtime fan favorites. The Demanufacture period is given four spots here, which is great considering how strong that album is, and then four more from Obsolete, which for many is the band's greatest album, containing such classics as "Edgecrusher" and "Resurrection", the latter filled with some effective futuristic clean vocals from Burton Bell, and the former is simply a groove laden yet crushing guitar driven extreme metal anthem. Honestly, I'm not sure why they included the cover of Gary Numan's "Cars" here, and while "Linchpin" from the Digimortal album was released as a single, there are better songs that could have been included in this set. As a whole, it would have maybe made more sense to release this as a double CD, as while the song list is strong, it's still not fully comprehensive by any means. New listeners will also not get anything from the Archetype or Transgression albums, as the band released these after leaving Roadrunner.

Still, for a sampling of Fear Factory from 1992-2001, essentially the "Roadrunner" and "Dino Cazares" (their former guitar player) years, this is a decent place to start.

Track Listing
1. Martyr
2. Scapegoat
3. Scumgrief
4. Demanufacture
5. Self-Bias Resistor
6. Zero-Signal
7. Replica
8. Shock
9. Edgecrusher
10. Resurrection
11. Cars
12. Linchpin

Added: October 25th 2006
Reviewer: Pete Pardo
Score:
Related Link: Fear Factory Website
Hits: 2154
Language: english

[ Printer Friendly Page ]
[ Send to a Friend ]