Changing sounds of metal

Friday, Dec. 8, 2006 | 7:12 a.m.

What: Fear Factory with Suffocation, Hypocrisy and Decapitated

When: 6 p.m. Sunday

Where: House of Blues at Mandalay Bay

Tickets: $20 advance; $22 day of show; 632-7600

Drummer Raymond Herrera is outside Fear Factory's tour bus in Seattle, ordering burgers for the band and juggling an interview on his cell phone.

"Hold on, all right?" he says to the interviewer, turning his attention to the server.

("That's a No. 2 with cheese. No. 9, regular size. That's a No. 2, a No. 9 and No. 10.")

"Sorry man, I'm at Burger King."

("Yeah, one of each.")

"Burger King has this special where they've got like three XBox games, but the catch is you've got to buy combos with them, and the guy was explaining it to me. He said, 'You can only get one,' and I'm like, 'So, I want all three games,' and he says, 'Oh, so you've got to order three combos.' "

("Yeah, that's what I'm going to do.")

Fear Factory stops at the House of Blues on Sunday with three other metal bands.

Herrera, Burton C. Bell and Dino Cazares hooked up in Los Angeles in 1989. Their band, Ulceration, became Fear Factory and changed the sound of metal, adding industrial sounds, eschewing guitar solos, mixing heavy and melodic vocal styles and even turning over tunes to remixers. The band has continued to experiment on albums such as "Soul of a New Machine" (1992), "Demanufacture" (1995), "Obsolete" (1998), "Concrete" (2002), "Archetype" (2004) and its latest release, "Transgression."

Eventually both Cazares and Bell left the band, although Bell has returned. But Herrera continues to be a driving force behind one of the most influential metal bands in the country.

In between bouts with the burger boy, Herrera talked with the Sun:

On metal

Yeah, it's gone in a different direction since we started. I guess we had a lot to do with that. There were a lot of ideas we kind of brought into metal that nobody was really doing. When we first started doing this band, no metal band had a singer that was doing the really heavy vocals and also the melodic vocals. We didn't want any guitar solos, which was another thing that really threw people. So we really brought a lot of different ideas to the table, and that essentially transformed metal from what it was at the time to like what it became. We had a lot to do with changing what metal even sounds like. We were like the pioneers of that.

On touring

We're in Seattle right now. Then Portland tomorrow. Then a day off in Denver, then we're in Albuquerque, then Vegas and then home (to Los Angeles).

I enjoy what I do. I'm not a huge fan of touring. I'm a homebody. I like to write and record, but obviously touring is part of the gig. There are worse things I could be doing than touring. The traveling sometimes wears on you a little bit when you've been on the road like eight or nine months straight. Every other aspect of the business, I enjoy.

On Vegas audiences

We'll get a lot of people from L.A., that's for sure, and surrounding cities. We did L.A. at the very beginning of this tour almost two months ago, so I know a bunch of people saying, "I'm going to Vegas! I'm going to Vegas!" Give them an excuse to go to Vegas.

On $20 tickets

It probably is the best bargain in town. In most cities we've gone with the lower ticket prices, we're going with the smaller venues on this tour. It's more about kind of like giving back to the fans, essentially, more of a Def Metal tour, like the old days essentially. Sometimes we want to do something like that, to show appreciation to the fans, the genre of music.

On CDs

"Transgression," yeah, that's the newest CD. We're working on something new, but we've been mainly touring.

("What's the total?")

We started writing some stuff, but you know, we've been on the road so much we've just been concentrating a little bit more on that.

("Yeah. What's that?")

We started writing a few things in between tours, like when we're home, in the studio. We've actually written a few things here and there but nothing concrete yet. But we'll get nitty-gritty with it in January for sure.