Fear Factory - "Digimortal" (Roadrunner)

The acceptable edge of sci-fi concept depends on how much you’re willing to tolerate this week’s post-apocalyptic future of humankind in the 21st century. If you didn’t know better and you glanced at the song titles to Fear Factory’s fourth full-length, you might be forgiven for thinking the celebrated industrial metal outfit guilty of recycling the same clichés of a world battered and broken by the rise of horrible, horrible machines. Having come close to self-parody on devastating but dangerously monochromatic outings such as Demanufacture and Obsolete, the quartet (comprised of vocalist Burt C. Bell, guitarist Dino Cazares, bassist Christian Olde Wolbers and drummer Raymond Herrera) either need to find a new shtick or reinvent the one they’ve got. Anything less is a one-way ticket to AC/DC land and the big goodbye to artistic freedom, in case they ever want to do anything other than condemn, write about and play like goddamn machines.

So how do they save themselves on Digimortal? In subtle ways that only strike you on second or third listen, once you’re done comparing every song on the 11-track outing to everything else they’ve ever recorded. Where Wolbers and Herrera would usually be buried beneath the über-brutality of Cazares’ guitar work, they actually get to shine through like a real rhythm section this time around. Bell stretches his chops in "Invisible Wounds (Dark Bodies)", a departure song for the Factory about the emotional state of an unborn fetus, working in some fine soul screaming over a damn catchy hook. And the grooves are looser, more relaxed now, making the quartet’s occasional attempts at recreating Demanufacture-era Factory ("Acres Of Skin") sound like sops to old-school fans, who want them to keep writing "Self-Bias Resistor" until we’re living in the brave new world Bell writes about.

And in case you’re wondering, that brave new world ain’t so bleak after all. This time around, Bell finally abandons the fight against Evil Killer Robots™ in favour of a generally positive look at integrating man with machine in far-distant future, where ordinary folk live forever by imprinting their own memories onto clones of themselves. Disturbing? You bet. A change in perspective from the monolithic doom ‘n’ gloom churned out the same way by the same people year after year? Hell, yes. Just like William Gibson’s Neuromancer sanctioned its main characters helping an artificial intelligence free itself from human control, as U2’s Zooropa hailed a disordered but glorious new future where we "don’t know the limit of what we’ve got," so albums like Digimortal are necessary to push the limits of sci-fi convention. The future may well indeed be a human wasteland, but today’s aspiring clones don’t have to know that.

Reviewed by: Jay Rajiva