Fear Factory
Aggression Continuum

D E A D L Y !!!

Unbelievable...I never would have imagined enjoying it so much...experiencing sadistic pleasure...pure and uncontrollable violence!!

Dino Cazares and Burton C. Bell are back; once again together to record an album. Before the umpteenth split, which I believe to be the final one.

But today is not a time for regrets. I want to tell you about this authentic bombshell, these 50 minutes of Groove-Techno-Industrial-Thrash Metal that only Fear Factory can produce, delighting my dazed and battered eardrums.

Let's make things clear right away: for the moment it is my album of 2021. Ruthless, at times claustrophobic, with those sounds so "closed" and compressed. Which remind me of the two masterpieces of the early career, especially Demanufacture year of the lord 1995.

And for once (a very rare exception) the production by the label Nuclear Blast proves to be spot-on, tremendously suited to the auditory boulder constructed by the Californian band.

Sounds of multifaceted heaviness, dominated by Dino's guitar, with that sound so personal, futuristic, coming from distant icy worlds. Glacial, steely music, like flowing lava. A fragmented, "crazy", broken drum that pins you to the wall. And Burton's voice that drives me mad, so multicolored, varied: stretched to the limit, with vocal cords near breaking...then suddenly the clean vocal openings, the "clean" choruses that partially break the pressing rhythm of almost all the tracks.

Ten songs.

At least five are prodigious, dizzying, especially the sensational opening trio: "Recode", "Disruptor" and the title track. But all the others are no less: perfect...furious rides with drawn swords, or rather black given the consistency and the brutal specific weight of every single second. It is my duty at this point to mention the monumental "Manufactured Hope", which remarkably harks back to the distant past of Fear Factory, both in the music and in the song's title.

Highest marks and for the millionth time I bow before this sonic institution!!!

Ad Maiora.