Fear Factory - Transgression CD Review

One of the original pioneers of the industrial metal genre refuses to die. The boys of Fear Factory are back yet again with their latest effort, Transgression. With a new cd comes… more of the same, and unfortunately it’s more of the same crap that was on their last two efforts, Archetype and Digimortal. Anyone hoping for the rawness of Demanufacture era and previous Fear Factory, sadly, need to keep hoping. I’d hoped they would at least maybe attempt to capture some of the ambitiousness of Obsolete, considering the raping their last two cds received when it came to reviews, but no. Instead they decided they’d just try to get even more boring.

The biggest and most glaring flaw this album has is its attempt to become more radio friendly, even more so than their last couple of albums. It’s hard to fathom why they would do this, considering their last two albums didn’t exactly light up the sales charts and mellowing even more probably won’t shift any more units at the local Best Buy.

Listening to songs like “Supernova”, “I Will Follow”, and “Echoes of My Scream” makes you really wonder if these are songs that the band that brought you classics like “Piss Christ”, “Martyr”, and “New Breed” would actually want to make. It almost feels like the members of Fear Factory have had their bodies possessed by the ghost of nu-metal past. It’s so hard on the ears to listen to the watered down, meandering mess that this cd is. Yeah, I can’t believe I used the word meandering to describe Fear Factory either.

What used to be a band that created pulse-pounding, mile-a-minute, blisteringly paced metal with a special electronic edge now feel slow, boring, and unevenly paced. Rarely will you hear the bruising double-bass marathons of old on Transgression. What you will get is a ton of songs focusing on melody, which some might see as a good thing, but most won’t, simply because, no offense to the band, as talented as they are they just aren’t suited for making melodic metal.

It’s hard to listen to a band slowly decline release after release, but that’s just what’s happening with each new effort that Fear Factory puts out. They either need to sit down, do some real soul searching, and find the intensity of the old Fear Factory or hang it up for good before things get too much worse.