Transgression (Transgression - Fear Factory)

Member Name: Frankingsteins

Product:	Transgression - Fear Factory
Date:	08/07/08 (15 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: A couple of powerful death metal songs.

Disadvantages: The rest is very weak.

Released only a year after 'Archetype' sought a return to the band's established trademark sound, 'Transgression' evidently seeks to push the boundaries of this sound to new extremes, but fails somewhere along the way. Rather than a drastic evolution, this is only a minor progression and one that isn't necessarily for the better, only really impressing when the style retreats even further back into Fear Factory's history and offers some convincingly heavy and angry death metal in the songs 'Spinal Compression' and 'Moment of Impact.' The rest is a comparatively weak mixture of ineffectual aggression and boring slow songs, the latter reaching its nadir in the deathly dull 'Echo of My Scream.'

The guitar tone is pretty horrible throughout, lacking the crunch of previous albums, but one area of improvement comes in Burton C. Bell's vocals, which try even harder than before to sing in conjunction with his standard death metal growl, and the result is pretty impressive. Overall, this album largely suffers for its jumbled arrangement and the inclusion of far too many weak songs, including the worthless covers of U2 and Killing Joke that really should have been saved for B-sides.

1. 540,000 Degrees Fahrenheit
2. Transgression
3. Spinal Compression
4. Contagion
5. Empty Vision
6. Echo of My Scream
7. Supernova
8. New Promise
9. I Will Follow (U2 cover)
10. Millennium (Killing Joke cover)
11. Moment of Impact

Summary: Fear Factory's eighth album (2005).