Fear Factory – Remanufacture (Cloning Technology) – Review

Fear Factory

Remanufacture (Cloning Technology) (Roadrunner)
by Scott Hefflon

With all the media attention (and, theoretically, consumer attention) aimed at electronic music, DJ geeks, and 101 remixtures of a song that was only OK to begin with (“Let’s pump up the bass on our industrial revolution anthem ‘Schism in your -ism’ and call it ‘Schism Aneurysm (Fudgy-Wudgy had a Blender Remix)'”), you’d think Fear Factory would be expanding their base of operations to keep up with the times. And you’d be right. While 1993’s Fear is the Mindkiller is only six songs long (three songs remixed, one song remixed twice with the LP original tacked on at the end), it displayed a surge forward for a band still trying to outgrow their humble death metal origins. In contrast, Remanufacture (Cloning Technology) is a bloated 60+ minutes of remixes of practically all eleven songs on Demanufacture, a monstrous, futuristic metal album to begin with. Where Fear is the Mindkiller excelled, Remanufacture… distracts. While Fear… may be considered dated and juvenile by today’s DJ standards (fuckin’ elitists, without a past you have no future), Front Line Assembly’s Rhys Fulber and Bill Leeb did offer fans and band alike a fresh look at how far the song structures could be taken. And from that experience, Fear Factory created Demanufacture, already fawned over as a huge step forward in extreme, aggressive music. So Remanufacture… had its work cut out for it from the start. Sure, FF enlisted “the talents of an elite global amalgam of electronic producers – Rhys Fulber, DJ Dano, Kingsize, Junkie XL” (what, you thought music crits were solely to blame for the uppity hype excreted?), but the end result is less dramatic because the original songs were much better. Yes, it’s a roaring record, packed with bulldozing powerchords and thumpa-thumpa beats all rendered into varying shades of commercially viable jungle, gabba, older-school techno hop, and open-wound ambient, but so what? From a FF fan perspective, what you get are samples from a song you liked sewn together by some DJ’s favorite sound effects. While this may be considered progressive, isn’t it rather detrimental when the flow of the song is interrupted by some sound-splicer’s input? And from an electrohead perspective, isn’t it a bit limiting to be working with such bombastic metal hoopla? How many different ways can you rework a bunch of guys gnashing their teeth, roaring their throats raw, and pounding away on their archaic instruments (guitar, bass, and drums, oh how novel!)?

Remanufacture (Cloning Technology) is, obviously, an important cross-breeding of styles. It is also, therefore, open to debate as to whether this kind of experimentation is for good, ill, or just milking a pop culture cash cow. As with Reznor’s multiple rides on the spiral, some of us like it broken more than we like it fixed. That way, there are no pretensions that this is the right way, it’s more of a temper tantrum that the world is fucked and, in many ways, a violent celebration of that fact. To some of us, broken is what we’ve come to expect, and that’s what we want. I don’t think Remanufacture is a significant improvement upon Demanufacture.