The Terminator came back, but it’s Fear Factory’s new album that claims the cybernetic crown.
Genexus is the latest in a long line of concept albums from Los Angeles’ most punishing metal act – and not to be confused with the new Terminator flick Genisys, the latest in a long line of movies about a punishing man made of metal.
The confusion would be justified, since the band’s albums have taken inspiration from the Terminator series in multiple forms: Song titles, sampled sounds, and inspired themes.
The band’s best concept album to date, arguably, is 1998’s Obsolete, which tracked the destructive and ultimately futile insurgence of a single dissident in a future earth society where the human race had been subdued and enslaved by the machines they had created to simplify their own lives.
The album was tied together by a short story, written like a screenplay and dubbed Conception 5, which was told alongside the lyrics in the liner notes and served to group the songs together as a single narrative.
Blade Runner and Star Trek collide with Kurt Vonnegut and George Orwell in Burton C. Bell’s own writing.
Genexus is a deep, gripping aural journey from start to finish, purely cinematic in its pacing and atmosphere, beautiful in its musicianship, thought-provoking in its lyrics, and unprecedented in its scope. It doesn’t need a mini-novel in the CD booklet to fill in the blanks, because every song works brilliantly in sequence. Vocalist and lyricist Burton C. Bell has had a lifelong fascination with science fiction, and it’s with Genexus that he has nailed not just a great record, but a great work of sci-fi.
It’s the album Fear Factory’s audience has been waiting two decades for: The album that surpasses Demanufacture, the 1995 genre-buster that inspired the likes of Slipknot and Killswitch Engage to bring clean singing and metal growls into their music.
Let’s take a walk through the story of artificial intelligence and genuine humanity, chapter by chapter.
1. Autonomous Combat System
“I am a weapon of human design, resist the system condemning your life”
The parallels to Blade Runner are obvious from the start. Rutger Hauer’s icepick-sharp demand for a longer life (“I want more life, fucker”) doesn’t just sum up the ambition to live but it also appeared 23 years ago in Flesh Hold, a track from Fear Factory’s debut album, Soul of a New Machine.
In this song, which builds up with an orchestral fanfare before the piston-punches of Mike Heller’s drums and Dino Cazares’ guitar introduce the band proper, we meet the robot that will walk a determined path from self-awareness and ambition to self-realisation and death.
At the core of Genexus‘ storytelling is the hypothesis of the technological singularity – tipped to potentially occur within the next three decades – when advances in artificial intelligence will effectively see machines surpass humankind as the earth’s dominant life form.
What happens when the machine that can think and feel can also understand mortality and the limits of its own design? In Autonomous Combat System, we meet “the model” – a humanoid machine that has become aware of its planned obsolescence and is ready to rage against the industry that produced it.
Imagine if your old iPod took up arms against you when you replaced it with something new.
2. Anodized
“My life is anodised, protect my mind, optimised, anodised, I’ll never die.”
Note: We here at Cake Oven will respect the Americanised spelling of the song title while spelling “Americanised” with the Queen’s English because we don’t want to wake the dragon.
Alright, people – let me impress you now with the only great fact I have in my otherwise bare closet of scientific knowledge. Do you know why drinks come in aluminium cans? ‘Cause they don’t rust, right? Why is that? Basically, aluminium is so reactive that it’s not reactive – the second it’s exposed to oxygen, it forms a basic anti-corrosive layer that protects it from rusting, and not a damned thing happens to it from there.
Anodising takes the metal to the next level, being an electro-chemical process that further protects it against corrosion and wear, making it more durable and versatile, able to interact and bond with other substances. For a machine trying to extend its lifespan and reduce its exposure to harm and decay, this is a perfect process.
What’s that mean to a human? We’re trying to protect ourselves against age, illness, and death too. We moisturise, we go to the gym, we shun smoking, we nurture our relationships, we sign up to dodgy Canadian dating websites and try to satisfy our darker urges. We’re trying to make ourselves stronger and safer in the face of the ultimate negativity. We’re anodising ourselves.
3. Dielectric
“My dissonance overpowers you.”
Dielectric strength describes an object’s ability to successfully withstand electrical intensity. /nerd
Starting off with some lurching string action which brings to mind scenes of Peter Parker becoming Spider-Man for the first time, Dielectric describes how the model understands its own potential – imagine He-Man bellowing “I HAVE THE POWER!” after raising his sword aloft.
Not only has the model been enhanced defensively, but its ability to kick ass without breaking a sweat has been dramatically increased.
4. Soul Hacker
“Breaking down defences, devouring access, decoding their dreams.”
Let’s talk about the music for a bit, because this song just rocks. It’s a heavy, groovy piece of metal that highlights everything great about Fear Factory. This was the first cut released from the album, surfacing first on YouTube as a lyric video incorporating imagery from the Genexus album cover and sleeve. Listen to it and see if you don’t come out feeling like you wanna take over the world.
Lyrically, Soul Hacker describes the struggle of the model and its general collective to fight off efforts by their creators to homogenise their thoughts and control their impulses – deterring any independent actions. It is the first indication of the model’s life taking a turn for the worse, as it meets increased resistance from its makers for the first time.
5. Protomech
“Take everything away from me. Replace my skin with circuitry.”
The model has realised that, a bit like the old White Zombie tune, it’s more human than human. It looks human but knows that it isn’t, and yet it wants to know what life could be – what it all means. Though the concept isn’t probed too deeply here, it’s not hard to imagine Frankenstein’s monster telling this story.
Here’s Fear Factory busting out Protomech live in France. While the iffy sound mix doesn’t give you the full force of Rhys Fulber’s amazing synth work (which is the secret to Genexus‘ success) it does give you a great idea of just how ridiculously cool Mike Heller is as a drummer. Does he ever break a sweat?
6. Genexus
“Servant or leader, who is the master?”
The title track is a merging of genesis and nexus, and is the most overt reference to the technological singularity. As the model strives to live and learn like a human, it understands that the race it has been created to serve has actually been surpassed by its own servants. Humanity has unwittingly put itself into evolution’s back seat. Power to the machines.
7. Church of Execution
“Faith executions through cowardly acts.”
As the model looks to understand what makes humans tick, it takes a quizzical and dim view of religious belief, declaring it to be about control and eradication.
It’s interesting to view this in the context of its author. There are a number of themes that have arisen time and time again in Fear Factory’s music, two of which Bell and I discussed in a 2012 interview. While no one burns to death in this album, there is another sharp jab into the ribs of religious oppressors.
Bell lives in a country where politics and religion are firmly enmeshed, with far-reaching and concerning consequences for individual freedoms; where religious extremism isn’t just filler for the news media – the threat has been realised and remains real to so many.
There is a culture of fear. Bell is calling it out.
8. Regenerate
“Breathing new life now, I will regenerate.”
There’s not a lot to be said about Regenerate, though it’s definitely a standout track and possibly the heaviest pop song you’ll ever hear – a bold statement of determination from a robotic model that refuses to go down or stay down.
9. Battle for Utopia
“The weight of my burden, the pain and the hurting. My life is real.”
This song’s fuelled with emotion – a discovery that humankind is dying out and soon the models of the Genexus era will be left as rulers on earth. The battle for this utopia, this perfect world, is driven by a powerful song – an aggressive declaration of war and a claim of sovereignty, summarising all that the model and its brethren have fought for since their creation.
The tune, though hopeful and proud in its execution, is threaded throughout with urgency and a sense of fragility. The model seems weary. Corrosion appears to be creeping in just as its hand clenches the crown.
10. Expiration Date
“Under the surface, we’re not machines. Under the surface, we’re living dreams.”
The feelings and memories that the model has experienced since its creation have brought it to the realisation that it is living as humans have done, and that it will die as humans have done. It has done all it can to earn an extended life, and it can do no more.
Expiration Date is the final track on Genexus and perhaps the finest song of Fear Factory’s 25-year career. It’s a slow rock number that is sombre and sentimental – it will find feelings in its listeners and bring them to the surface. Nothing challenges us to consider the meaning of life more than when we are compelled to contemplate life’s end.
“It’s a shame you won’t live, but then again, who does?”
That’s Genexus, and this is an altogether different Fear Factory lyric video. Set your phasers to pun:
