It often seems these days like everything ever recorded by everyone will at some point become available on CD (or whatever audio format lies further down the track). This is, after all, the age of the reissue, and, moreso, the age of the previously unissued. Sometimes it may take a while to rear its head, but it'll rear it eventually. Eleven years after it was recorded, Fear Factory's "new" album Concrete is finally doing exactly that.

Concrete represents not only the first recordings of the band but also the first work of its producer, Ross Robinson. The story of the album is told in the liner notes and briefly goes like this: Robinson recorded the album with the band in 1991, and then attempted to get them to sign a contract with him. The band refused, wound up in court, and left with the rights to the songs and the publishing. Robinson left with the rights to the actual sound recordings.

The band then used their copy of the tape as a demo, securing a deal with Roadrunner Records, who eventually bought the tape from Robinson and who present us with Concrete at last. You've actually probably heard many of these songs before, as the band rerecorded eight of them with Colin Richardson for their first released album, Soul Of A New Machine. The liner notes describe the various fates of the songs; some of them even saw action long after this time, with one track being rerecorded during the Obsolete sessions in 1998 and turning up as a B-side on the "Resurrection" single.

History will note Fear Factory as one of the most interesting metal bands of recent years, and Concrete permits us to go back to their beginnings. In 1991 they were still a pretty much straightforward death metal band, although even in those days they were not averse to leavening vocalist Burton C. Bell's death growls with more melodic vocal lines and throwing in the occasional sample too. Still, it's a work of comparative juvenilia, as evidenced by the lyrics; although Concrete features no lyric sheet, Soul Of A New Machine does, hence we can check out at least some of the songs and see they're relatively limited compared to their later stuff; there seems to be little if any of the technophobia the later albums display. (Odd, perhaps, given the amount of technology the band made their music with.)