Demanufacture is just one hell of an album. The music on this album, as stated, if just crushing. A good majority of the songs also feature clean singing, which often works for the music. “Self Bias Resistor” is an absolutely amazing song that properly includes clean singing vocals with a catchy chorus, and “Zero Signal” follows the same pattern, but doesn’t really alter the heaviness of the music during the chorus. The only problem is that as you go through the album, many of the songs seem to follow a pattern of having a shouted verse, and a sung chorus, or just have shouting vocals form start to end. “Dog Day Sunrise” is an exception to this, having the verse being sun in the first place, but also note that this is a cover song to begin with.

“Body Hammer” isn’t one of the greatest songs on here, feeling more like a filler track, much like the cover song “Dog Day Sunrise”. The song “Flashpoint” is the same, but at least is heavier and seems to have some effort put into it. Some may enjoy this track, but in the end it just doesn’t stack up to anything else on this release. The last track, “A Therapy For Pain” isn’t necessarily a bad track, or a filler track, but it’s definitely a hit or miss. This really slow paced song seems to just go on forever, and the singing is rather bland through most of the parts, except when the music really picks up and becomes louder for the chorus. To put it another way, the vocalist sounds tone deaf for the song, which is technically about five minutes and twenty five seconds. After that, it’s just ambient industrial sounds until the end of the track.

Of course, the length of the last track wouldn’t pose much of a problem if it weren’t for the fact that this is the digipack version with four bonus tracks. Instead, this outro to the album winds up being an inconvenience as it takes forever to reach the additional material, which isn’t all too good in the first place. The song “Your Mistake”, which is a cover of the punk/hardcore song by Agnostic Front just doesn’t seem to fit the band at all, but the track “¡Resistencia!” is a pretty heavy song that should have actually been in the main mix instead of “Dog Day Sunrise” or “Body Hammer”. Of course, the two bonus tracks are industrial remixes of tracks on the album, which is nothing new for fans since Fear Factory put out the release Fear Is The Mindkiller, an EP of remixes from their debut album. If you didn’t enjoy those, there really would be no reason to listen to the aggravating “Replica (Electric Sheep Mix)”, but “New Breed (Revolutionary Designed Mix) is at least tolerable and stays close to the sound of the actual release.

Demanufacture is definitely a great album with some very heavy music, but sadly it does fall prey to your typical issues. While the production on the album is superb, the music itself will often be repetative as many songs follow the same type of pattern: scream verse, sing chorus. With only two, possibly three filler tracks, the actual album itself is pretty great. But, unfortunately the digipack version isn’t really worth the extra funds outside of “¡Resistencia!”, especially since the closing track, “A Therapy For Pain” doesn’t really work on here. Had that song been put at the end of the CD after the four bonus tracks, like it appears on the standard edition, the track would have really held it’s own as a closer.

Physical review copy of this release provided by personal funds.