Review Summary: Archetype
In 2004, Fear Factory released an album called
Archetype, but they really should have saved the title for this release –
Replica would have been a much better title for that album, but we won’t get into that here. Across
Aggression Continuum’s forty-nine-minute runtime, there are facets of just about every full-length album’s unique niche (barring the band’s death metal debut). There are the predictable elements that have graced just about the entire discography -- including the rapid-fire riffs, harsh vocals, electronics, and catchy choruses. There’s the mainstream groove of
Digimortal, the melodic undercurrents of
Genexus, the crushing industrialized metal of
Mechanize, and even a little hint of
Transgression’s aimless experimentation. All of these callbacks to previous releases are
Aggression Continuum’s biggest draw as well as its biggest weakness.
Just about every song on
Aggression Continuum can be traced back to something remarkably similar on a previous album. This has the unfortunate consequence of making the entire release sound familiar even on first listen. It is unfortunate because, despite the familiarity,
Aggression Continuum is another great Fear Factory release -- it is just… archetypical. The riffs – you have heard them before. The machine gun percussion – no surprises there. The aggressive vocals on the verses, and clean singing on the choruses – predictable. The industrial flourishes – still there, just (mostly) not done by Rhys Fulber. You get the point. What that description might not impart is just how solid an album
Aggression Continuum is. After thirty years, Dino and Burton know exactly how to make a Fear Factory song, and some of the most consistent of the bunch are here – they just owe a lot to their past.
There has been a lot of talk in this review about how much
Aggression Continuum owes to the Fear Factory discography, but the album is not just a total rehash. Despite every Fear Factory release since
Demanufacture essentially working from the same blueprint, each album has also had its own unique facet that made it worth listening to --
Aggression Continuum will be known for some of the band’s best songwriting. Dino and Burton have taken all the things that made previous songs stand out, and re-crafted them using thirty years of songwriting experience, and it shows. Most noticeable, they have taken the melody-dominated sound of
Genexus, the unrelenting drive of
Demanufacture, and the crushing production of
Mechanize. With those elements, they have managed to produce their most easily accessible album while still clearly sounding like Fear Factory.
If you didn’t know, Burton Bell exited Fear Factory before the release of
Aggression Continuum; leaving behind a 30-year legacy, and a sound that was 100% unique when Fear Factory first came onto the scene. Over that time, they released ten consistently solid albums (yes… that includes
Transgression) and even defined a genre.
Aggression Continuum is the culmination of that legacy, offering nothing new, but gathering all the band’s best elements under the collective wing of thirty years of songwriting experience. If they could have called this release
Archetype (and called that other one
Replica … just saying), it would describe this album to a tee; and that is not a dig. At the end of the day, though, the album name is just semantics because
Aggression Continuum really is the career-spanning archetypical Fear Factory release that ends the era of Burton Bell in style (whether it’s called
Archetype or not).
