Rating:
Genre:
Rock
Release Date: 09/08/1992
Run Time: 55:15
Soul of a New Machine ushered in the '90s
alternative metal era, even if few realized it at the time.
Fear Factory were quite ahead of their time in 1992, the year
Roadrunner Records released
Soul, their debut album (though not technically their first, which would be the later-unearthed,
Ross Robinson-produced
Concrete demo album). The band didn't fit neatly into any of the
metal camps of the day:
thrash metal (
Pantera,
Slayer,
Sepultura), crossover
metal (
Metallica,
Megadeth,
Ozzy),
industrial metal (
Ministry,
Nine Inch Nails,
Godflesh),
death metal (
Morbid Angel,
Death,
Obituary),
grindcore (
Napalm Death,
Brutal Truth,
Lawnmower Deth), and so on. This fact alone made
Fear Factory an anomaly among the market-driven
metal field of the day. That
Roadrunner even gave them a chance regardless goes to show how much promise
Fear Factory exhibited at the time -- market or no market,
Roadrunner sensed there was something special about this band and decided to take a chance. And indeed there was something special about
Fear Factory, as
Soul of a New Machine went on to demonstrate. One of the top two
death metal producers of the day,
Colin Richardson, flew from England into Los Angeles (only days after the 1992 riots had ravaged the city), and for the next four weeks, he produced what would become a downright groundbreaking
metal album.
Soul of a New Machine was so groundbreaking because it fuses together some of the best aspects of numerous
metal subgenres: the rhythmic crunch of
thrash, the melodies of crossover
metal, the syncopated man-machine lock-step of
industrial, the growling low end of
death metal, and the blitzkrieg impact of
grindcore. Just as importantly, it did away with the generic aspects of each subgenre, resulting in a unique sound that was in no way whatsoever clichéd (though it would later become a cliché itself years later). Granted,
Soul of a New Machine isn't
Fear Factory's best album, not even by a stretch, and it didn't shake up the
metal world at the time of its release. However, a few years later, once the band broke through with
Demanufacture (1995), there were myriad bands mixing and matching different
metal equations, thus bringing about the "
alternative metal" descriptor. So if you're curious about where it all began,
Soul of a New Machine is arguably ground zero. If you're simply looking for some kick-ass
metal, though, there's plenty of that here too, especially the first half of the album, with
"Martyr," "Scapegoat," and
"Scumgrief" standing out as particular highlights. And if you like what you hear here, you'll also want to pick up the
Fear Is the Mindkiller remix EP that followed a year later. It takes the music a logical step further, to amazing results (courtesy of
Bill Leeb and
Rhys Fulber of
Front Line Assembly).
Roadrunner thankfully remastered and reissued both in 2004 as a single deluxe package.
~Jason Birchmeier, All Music Guide
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