Jan 18, 2009 (15 years ago) The Manning Bar Camperdown, New South Wales, Australia
Alternative Metal, Death Metal, Groove Metal, Heavy Metal, Industrial, Industrial Metal, Industrial Rock, Metal, Nu Metal, Rap Metal, Rap Rock, Thrash Metal, Latin Metal, and United States.
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Fear Factory, Manning Bar, January 18, 2009 Fear Factory returned to Australia as an all new machine for their Big Day Out Sydney sideshow. After a false start last June due to recording commitments, the latest line-up of Fear Factory finally made it to Australia. Anticipation was running high and the pit was thick with black-shirt-clad humanity and excitement. The bar lines stretched almost half way across the back of the room as a chant went up from the first few rows.
As the room darkened, the band's logo was lit and out they rushed, with singer Burton C. Bell flanked on either side by large nugget-y men intent to wreak havoc with their instruments - bass player and Viking lookalike Byron Stroud and the imposing Dino Cazares, whose guitar looked like a toy in his bulging arms. Sitting up back high behind the drums was the stoic vision of drummer Gene Hoglan and he burst into a blur of sticks for the pummelling opening of 'Shock' and unstirringly blasted incomprehensibly rapid explosions of beats or cracking attacks of bass drum and toms for the remainder of the night without so much as blinking.
Fear Factory and their multi-levelled sounds are highly influential to numerous bands across a number of strains that veer away from traditional metal. Their styles converge even within the one song. 'Smasher/Devourer' has the hard-riff grit and gravelly scream of your heavier and darker shades of the genre before it pares back to an industrial haze of noise and even a scream-along, fist-pumping chorus in the middle. Some songs jump between styles more seamlessly than others, as the many stilted attempts to incite a circle pit showed, but the songs were done with such volume and precision it tended to blow away the disjointedness.
There was a bracket of songs from their 1992 debut ('Martyr', 'Scapegoat' and 'Crash Test') that were lapped up, and some new songs aired - the melodic crush of 'Powershifter' and 'Fear Campaign' which is a riff and machine-gun drum-fired, industrial-tinged monster of a thing. We were sent off into the night with a triumvirate of tracks from Demanufacture, ending with the whole crowd screaming and punching along to the chanting repeated lyric of 'Replica': "I don't want to live this way". Huge.
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