So the Australian Fear Factory tour has been cancelled
I’m disappointed but not overly surprised, given the circumstances.
I was lucky enough to get a chance to interview Dino Cazares on the phone the other week, you can read the interview over at Metal As Fuck. Dino is an interesting, intelligent and opinionated dude, and my twenty minutes on the phone was a lot of fun. He shied away from saying much about the legal dramas, saying that Burton had asked him to come back and Burton would be making a statement – so that line of enquiry didn’t really get anywhere.
But it seems pretty clear cut to me – Burton C Bell feels responsibility for the entity that is Fear Factory. Trangression was a crappy album that got panned not only by critics but by fans and eventually the band members at the time. Burton thinks back to where it all started to go wrong and concludes that perhaps that telling Dino to piss off wasn’t the smartest move he’d made. Dino has a bit of a beef with Christian Olde Wolbers, who moved from bass to guitar after Dino’s departure, and Christian isn’t going to want to shut up and go back to bass just because Dino and Burton are speaking again, so he no longer fits into this particular scenario. Christian and Raymond Herrera are friends and do a lot of work together, so Raymond is not likely to go back into a Fear Factory lineup that does not include Christian. Plus Byron Stroud has been doing an admirable job on bass for the last six years anyway so there’s no point upsetting that. All that is needed is a drummer – and in a situation like that (legendary heavy metal band requires legendary drummer) you can’t really go past Gene Hoglan.
It’s not great for Christian and Raymond and by the sounds of it they are fully entitled to dispute the use of the Fear Factory name. I agree that Burton and Dino probably should have called themselves something else. But the one big upshot for fans and people who just love the music that Fear Factory put out is that Christian and Raymond have put together a recording that, by Raymond’s own admission, sounds like Fear Factory with a different singer (that singer being Jon Howard of Theat Signal). That album is being released under the name Arkarea next month and hooley dooley, it’s been a long time since there was new music that sounds just like Fear Factory so I’m very, very excited about hearing it. Just as I’m very excited about the prospect of hearing new music that Burton and Dino make together.
At the end of the day, the soap opera dramas are tiresome and it’s always a shame when the reputation of a once-legendary band gets pulled down by legal disputes – but if as a result we get two cool records from some great musicians that’s actually a good thing.