Review: The Red Chord - Fed Through The Teeth Machine

Those with less than perfect health take head - The Red Chord is not for the squeamish and most definitely not for the weak. The veteran extreme metal band is celebrating 10 years in 2009 with the release of Fed Through The Teeth Machine, the band’s fourth and most extreme CD.

For the most part, Fed Through The Teeth Machine follows the standard in-your-face Red Chord approach with tracks like Hour Of Rats and The Ugliest Truth, but there are some elements that show a band that’s grown and improved with this release.

Let’s face it, with 2007’s Prey For Eyes, The Red Chord created an album that quickly became a fan favorite and would be hard to top. The only direction the band could improve on is songwriting and production because the instrumentation and vocal screams reached a strong peak with that album. With that, Fed Through The Teeth Machine contains some strong songwriting, a few cool riffs and a couple of twists and surprises.

Demoralizer and Ingest The Ash have taken the sound to a new evil with a combination of vocals and instrumentation which almost sound like curses cast by demons, while the arrangement of Floating Through The Vein has groove-like elements of old-school Metallica intertwined with production tricks used by grunge bands like Alice In Chains (keep in mind that this sounds nothing like Metallica or AIC overall, but there are elements of these sounds mixed into the traditional Red Chord sound).

Fed Through The Teeth Machine is by no means a landmark album, but it does have a few songs that will kick some serious ass in concert (Floating Through The Vein and Embarrassment Legacy will sound great next to Bone Needle for example). But this is the next logical step for The Red Chord, and it might take a few more listens before I would consider this a better album than Prey For Eyes.

Kim Cushington
RockStar Weekly