I've almost always found this band completely irrelevant. Almost always. 'Cos Soul of a New Machine was pretty damn good and heavy all those years ago. Shit, how old are these guys now? Probably still younger than me. And then Strapping Young Lad came out with Heavy As a Really Heavy Thing and basically blew FF away artistically and sarcastically meaning that FF for me became irrelevant. And when all the kids started jumping on Demanufacture, well, that was it. See ya pricks. So what that means is I haven't listened to this band for a long time. I've read reviews, mostly all bad over the last few years. I remember seeing them live in a tiny Melbourne club and man I was just shocked at how BAD a vocalist Burton Bell was. Is. I mean he's OK on record, right? But without question the worst live vocalist I've ever seen, genre be damned. I admired the way he was mixing up the croaky and clean stuff on record, but you just had to be able to do at least some of it live. He couldn't. That just about did it for me and FF.
So that's where this review is coming from. I'm not much of a fan. So I must disappoint you all by not sticking my jackboots straight into the mouth of this bunch of mp3s by declaring "Mechanize".....not too bad. Sonically, it's pretty awesome. I think Rhys Fulber has produced it but don't quote me. It's real full, bassy, and together. Nice balance all round. I only listen to music through fair quality earbud type headphones these days and it sounds good. I imagine it'd do some damage on a nice pair of speakers. I checked out "Archetype" after reading how good that was supposed be and the production here slaughters it, simple as that.
What Mechanize is about is tightness and riffs. And lots and lots of thumping double kicking. They've still got that fucking atmospheric bullshit synth jumping in all over the place, but the guitars sound so damn good on this I'll give 'em a pass. Basically it's a pretty unrelenting attack of accessible but still damn heavy industrial metal riffage until track 8 "Designing the Enemy" drops back the pace for some downhome stlye synth atmospheric bullshit. Boring. "Final Exit" you would think, would end the LP on a heavy note....nope!! They go for at least two different big melodic choruses and some horrid Burton Bell "singing" on the verses. Yeah sure there's some riffage to be found, but I didn't have the patience to sit through this one for 8 min, including 3 minutes of extended synth ambience at the end. Idiots.
Gotta admit, pleasantly surprised, at least the first 7 tracks. Why they decided to steer the LP off into the other fucking direction at the end I wouldn't know. Couldn't help 'emselves I guess.
So I think I've chosen poorly here. I really wanted to slag the shit out of an LP to start my blog, and I thought I had a pretty good candidate in "Mechanize". Credit to FF, they've pulled a nice quick shifty one and released a pretty good record. It'll never make high rotation on my earbuds, but certainly I can't say I hated it.
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