After the disappointing cancellation of their festival warm-up gig the day before, and missing them at Wacken the week before, I was now really looking forward to spend some time in the Fear Factory, and I was not the only one…

Burton C. Bell remembered playing here four years ago, and was happy to see how much the festival had grown since then.
Well, the sound may have stunk up in the front-rows, but the atmosphere was genuinely great, and the pure pressure of the masses helped verify the words of the singer. The pressure was of course doubly increased by the wild moshing which erupted as soon as the first riff of opener Mechanize rang out through the speakers, and when Edgecrusher began the entire audience simultaneously lifted from the air in one big jump.
Not that the intensity lessened after this, when fantastic Fear Campaign came on a giant circlepit formed, and there was loud crowd-singing in Martyr and Demanufacture (well, all of them actually, but these two were especially loud). The singing could have been good to have in Powershifter as well, as Burton’s voice broke a lot in the clean parts of the song (as it often does).

Ok, so I had already seen Fear Factory twice this year, so there were no surprises for me in the set or performance, but you know what? I say, why fuck with perfection?
This was certainly the gig of the day, and possibly the gig of the festival for me. Absolutely brilliant.
The only thing which bugged me was that there was no word from the band about what had happened with the aforementioned cancellation...

Setlist:

Mechanize
Shock
Edgecrusher
Acres Of Skin
Powershifter
Fear Campaign
Christploitation
Martyr
Demanufacture
Self Bias Resistor
Replica