Fear Factory members squabble over who has ownership of the Fear Factory name

It was recently announced that Fear Factory frontman Burton C. Bell and former Fear Factory guitarist Dino Cazares have mended their strained friendship and decided to reform Fear Factory with Strapping Young Lad bassist Byron Stroud and drummer Gene Hoglan, while Christian Olde Wolbers and Raymond Herrera went on to form Arkaea with Jon Howard and Pat Kavanagh of Threat Signal.  It seems Christian and Raymond aren’t too happy about being “kicked out” of Fear Factory according to a recent post on Blabbermouth;

ARKAEA/FEAR FACTORY members Christian Olde Wolbers (guitar) and Raymond Herrera (drums) were the featured guests on the June 14, 2009 edition of the nationally syndicated radio program “Speed Freaks”.

When asked if FEAR FACTORY was “done,” Raymond replied, “We’re [Christian and I] actually still in FEAR FACTORY. There’s a big legal battle going on right now. Essentially, what’s happened is Dino [Cazares, former FEAR FACTORY guitarist] and Burt [C. Bell, FEAR FACTORY singer] have become friends again and they decided to start a new band, and furthermore, they decided to call it FEAR FACTORY. They never communicated with us about it, and they’re acting like there was never any contract, but there’s four members that are Fear Factory Incorporated — which is the four of us — so it’s almost like them two against us two, so it’s kind of a stalemate. Moving forward, I don’t know what’s gonna happen with the trademark, so to speak. It’s kind of a weird situation, but it’s not a situation that we created that was weird.”

On the subject of how ARKAEA came together, Raymond said, “What ultimately ended up happening was Christian and I had written, like, eight songs for the next FEAR FACTORY record, which is essentially what the ARKAEA record ended up being, and there was kind of a personal disagreement there with Burt not wanting to continue. And we’re like, ‘Well, we’re sitting on all these songs. What are we gonna do with them?’ kind of a thing, and Christian was like, ‘Well, why don’t we do something else with it?’ So Christian was… It was actually kind of his brainchild to put this whole thing together. He was like, ‘Hey, let’s get Jon [Howard, vocals; THREAT SIGNAL] in here, let’s do this and let’s do that. We’ll do a different band.’ And I was like, ‘OK, cool. Let’s do that.’”

Needless to say, the entire situation is hilariously ridiculous.  There’s the Strapping Young Lad / Fear Factory project on one side and the Fear Factory / Threat Signal project on the other.  Dino hasn’t written a decent song, let alone a decent album, since parting ways with Fear Factory in 2002.  Fear Factory sucked horribly without him.  The Arkaea project is so laughably bad there’s no doubting why Burton didn’t want to have that crap associated with the Fear Factory name.

Both projects are doomed to fail horribly, although, honestly, the Strapping Young Lad project has the most chance of succeeding at sucking the least.  Hopefully both of these projects will be short lived and we won’t have to hear much about either of them because I doubt any of them can compile a full new album worth of material that’s anywhere near as worthwhile as the band’s first two albums.  Gotta love pointless band drama, this is even dumber than gay Gorgoroth vs gay-but-not-quite-as-gay Gorgoroth.  What a bunch of fucking tards.

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