FEAR FACTORY had a problem after "Demanufacture": the album worked, which meant everyone wanted another one. Burton C. Bell has now described how the band answered that — by building "Obsolete" as its inversion.
"Where 'Demanufacture' has a cold, very technical, mechanical and precise sound, 'Obsolete' is the opposite," Bell told Eonmusic. "It's warm and organic sounding, but still maintaining that metal industrial sound."
That was a decision, not a drift. "We did not want to reiterate or reinvent 'Demanufacture'," he said. "We had to move forward, not just in sound but in concept as well." The 1998 record became a full concept album, with Bell using the running order itself as the frame for the narrative — a dystopia in which humanity and its machines have stopped being separable.
The part of the story that gets least attention is the hip-hop. Bell says the band were "all fans" of it and went looking for ways to put it in the music rather than beside it. "Hip-hop played an essential role in a couple of the songs — 'Edgecrusher' and 'Descent'," he said.
"Edgecrusher" brought in members of the Canadian group SWOLLEN MEMBERS, and the rapper Madchild ended up coaching Bell's vocal delivery in the room. "Madchild and I really got high in the studio and started writing lyrics," Bell recalled. "He was helping me, almost like a tutorial in hip-hop. He was saying, 'This would be cool. Try and deliver it like this. Deliver it like this.' And it fucking clicked." For "Descent" he went to BONE THUGS-N-HARMONY and worked out his approach from there.
And underneath the dystopia there is a breakup. "Resurrection" came out of the end of Bell's mid-1990s relationship with musician Tairrie B, of MANHOLE, TURA SANTANA and MY RUIN. He rewrote it upward, into humanity reviving its own soul, but he is clear about where it started.
"A lot of the lyrics are very personal," he said. "What I did to them, I made them ambiguous, maybe in a third-person sense, but they were very personal from personal experiences."
The interview was given ahead of the three "Obsolete By Word Of Mouth" evenings we covered on September 12 — fifty people a night, no microphone, no phones. Bell left FEAR FACTORY in September 2020 and is two songs from finishing his debut solo album.