April 2024 - Albums I have listened to

While everyone is (rightfully) talking about Steve Albini, let’s not forget about Craw, a criminally underappreciated Cleveland band from the early 1990s. Albini produced some of their early stuff.

I was lucky enough to be at Case Western when they formed and were playing shows around Cleveland pretty regularly, especially at the Euclid Tavern (and nearly always with some awesome Derek Hess poster art). They played pretty brilliant and challenging post-hardcore in the days before the genre crawled up its own butt and turned into “math rock”.

I have enjoyed nearly every album this band has put out, so I was happy to see that they have a new one today.

Unfortunately, I kind of hate this album.

It is—as far as I know—their first album with lyrics and my friends, this is not a change for the better. Are they deliberately trying to make a Morrissey album? Because that is what this one sounds like. Actually, more like Morrissey on muscle relaxants. I don't like Morrissey, and I certainly do not need a record that sounds like an even more soporific version of Morrissey.

I bought this album right around the time it came out and listened to it a lot in the late 1990s. Thrash and industrial were among my favorite genres at the time, and Fear Factory had a pretty sweet spot right at the intersection of the two.

For whatever reason, I don't think I have listened to Demanufacture at all in the intervening 20+ years. There was a mention of the band in something I was reading a few days ago, so I decided to revisit the album. I was a bit nervous going into it—not everything I used to like still hold up—but I was not disappointed.

Does it sound a little dated? Sure, but then so do most albums that are more than a few years old. If you want something that sound entirely of its time, go listen to any rock album that came out in the first decade of the 2000s.

Even so, I find that Demanufacture holds up really well. It is just a great album from start to finish and listening to it now, I'm kind of amazed by how ahead-of-its-time it was. I think Fear Factory probably doesn't get the credit they deserve when it comes to highly influential bands and albums.

These guys are a Japanese band that goes all the way back to 1996. This is the first of their albums I have listened to—it just came out at the tail end of March—and I really like it.

It's some pretty great and heavy death metal, but they also manage to stretch things out a bit and keep it interesting and diverse over the course of all the tracks on the album.