Fear Factory, Hate Eternal, Kobra and the Lotus live at the Rave in Milwaukee, WI 4/18/13

Last Updated on Tuesday, 23 April 2013 17:14 Written by David Schock

Artist: Fear Factory, Hate Eternal, Kobra and the Lotus

Venue: The Rave in Milwaukee, WI

Date: 4/18/13

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Considering that parts of Chicago, it’s suburbs and sections of Wisconsin had been declared a state of emergency due to the flash floods and the pummeling that we took with 24 straight hours of rain, it’s a miracle we even made up to Milwaukee, Wisconsin’s “The Rave”, which was playing host to Fear Factory on their latest leg of “The Industrialist” tour.

Now on top of the weather related issues we were struggling with, we had actually talked about canceling the trip entirely based just on the poor selection of support acts that were accompanying Fear Factory for their “Industrialist” tour. I didn’t know much about the openers, Canada’s Kobra and the Lotus and Florida’s Hate Eternal but after watching an hours worth of You Tube videos on each of them I was not too encouraged. It did not take long for me to realize that my worst fears were coming true. Kobra and the Lotus are described by Classic Rock Magazine as something like this "Kobra And The Lotus are the fire-breathing, female-fronted heavy metal bombshell. Classic, Priest-loving riffs. Powerhouse drummer. Singer who can belt the Halfordian high-notes ... these Canadian head-bangers can't return soon enough for us". What they meant to say is that KatL can best be described as nothing short of an unoriginal mess. Take elements of Iron Maiden/Priest/Lita Ford and some mid eighties cheese like Ratt or Warrant and combine that with a visual mix of lead singer “Kobra Paige” wearing something that Adam Ant would have rejected, toss in a terrible band font and an odd Egyptian motif and you had what was at times, a grating unbearable unwatchable siren’s call.

Now I am a fan of Extreme Metal, Black Metal and the sorts and I also have a pretty decent musical collection of such, so I feel I can speak intelligently on the 2^nd band, Hate Eternal” and their performance, despite them not falling into my “preferred” electronic/industrial genre. Tampa’s Hate Eternal and Erik Rutan (of Morbid Angel & Ripping Corpse fame) immediately bombarded the crowd with songs off their latest album “Phoenix amongst the Ashes”. However what occurred during their set shocked me to the bone. Now for those of you who aren’t familiar with Milwuakee, they love their metal there, and I mean REALLY love it and they will start a mosh pit to anybody and anything. I actually prefer seeing shows in Milwaukee rather than Chicago for that very fact, but Hate Eternal’s performance subdued the normally riotous crowd into standing around in complete boredom and towards the end of their set barely generated even the polite “golf clap” amongst the Milwauke metal heads. Their set was loud, long, beyond comprehension, without any hooks either visually or audibly and was mixed so poorly that is just sounded like indiscernible noise. When they did manage to do something interesting musically they quickly buried that part of the song and layered on noise after noise after noise. I’m not sure why this band is securing so many positive accolades for their live show as they did not bring their “A” game tonight.

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Photos by: David Schock

Finally it was time for Fear Factory to take the stage and it was clear from the opening moments of “The Industrialist” that (A) Fear Factory meant business and that they were going to demand the attention of a crowd that had grown bored with the previous support acts and also that (B)a slimmed down Burton Bell was suffering from some illness. The rest of the night would see the crowd watching him hunched over gasping for air and there were also several moments where his voice was not able to handle the strain of the melodic chorus parts that normally set FF aside from their metal contemporaries. With that said, at no point during the night did Burton apologize or make excuses for the moments when his vocal chords failed him. In fact the crowd not only appreciated his efforts in powering through the set but they also reciprocated in full by singing the majority of the set back to the band in one collective voice. This portion of the “Industrialist” tour saw Fear Factory performing new songs as well as playing songs from throughout their entire back catalog. Much to the fans delight they took us all the way back to 1992 with tracks such as “Martyr” and “Leechmaster”, which is a new edition to the live set for as long as I can remember seeing Fear Factory now. They did skip tracks off of albums; Transgression, (thank god for that) and also Archtype, which was a tad surprising considering there are some solid tunes that came off of that effort. 2010’s Mechanize” was represented by “Powershifter” and “Fear Campaign” which are quickly becoming classics. As one might they ended the night with four straight tracks off of 1995’s industrial metal classic, Demanufacture which sent the room into 20 minute long mosh pit and the exhausted crowd home happy as the boys ended their set with their now familiar, “We are Fear Factory and we will be back!”

Fear Factory continue to fill in the gap that Ministry left behind many many years ago and once again put on a show that is “must see” especially if you are a fan of “industrial metal”, “Industrial Rock” or “Cold Wave”. Not the best performance that I had ever seen them put on (mostly due to Burton’s illness and also the slimmed down line up sans synth player) but overall I would score it a 7.5 out of Ten.

Fear Factory Setlist from 4/18 Milwaukee