I’ve always really liked Fear Factory but for some reason have never really bothered digging that far into their discography. Outside of “Edgecrusher” and the frankly fucking excellent cover of Gary Numan’s “Cars” (which features the man himself), I’ve never really heard anything else off this album until now. I was familiar with the snare drum sound however, as a sample of it is a default in the 2000s-era drum machine program for Windows, called Rhythm Rascal.
All in all, this is pretty good. A lot of the themes and songwriting styles stay over from Demanufacture, but there’s a chunkier heaviness to the songs which partly dials back to Soul Of A New Machine, and partly instead fully embraces the groove and chug of the nu metal movement which was insanely massive at the time. This is obviously a formula that worked well for the band (at the time at least), as they followed this path more seriously on the Digimortal album which came 3 years later.