article from rock n world:

Every once in awhile it's just nice that, when you're talking about a heavy metal record, it's actually heavy. So many bands are lumped in together as being hard, while the truth is, most of them are just hard to the masses that think Limp Bizkit really lays it down and that Fred Durst is some kind of bad-boy anarchist like the rap stars he plays on t.v.

So it renders especially exhilarating when a band like Factory 81 comes along with a musical style that one can only call "hard-ass." There's a festering presence that moves along with the music that engineers driving riffs, wickedly infectious beats, and creates a medium for the love of the scream, here used in full primal hollaring mode by singer Nate Wallace. His gutteral vocals and harsh bellows match the music where it decides to go, and he can slide into a Keenan-esque croon or rap-tinted rant with relative ease, neither of which comes off as forced or too out of place. And all the elements slide together in a rawly done, objectively focused disc called Mankind.

The constantly escalating album opener "Nanu" sets the pace that the rest of the record follows almost exclusively, creating a soundtrack dinstictly designed for the mosh-pits of the world. "Cheese Wheel" showcases undeniable melody structure and "3 O'clock Love Letter" is a stripped down anthem of being stranded outside staring in, with it's telling and grabbing hook-line, "All I want is someone to love me, but who can ever love a freak?" But it's "Peace Officer" that drives the real intensity home, and it's remix version shows a cleverness and natural breeding of hip-hopped music and fierce vocals.

Not every song on the record feels fresh or on-point ("Belligerence" never really appears right from the start), and not every song is consistently good all the way through, but Mankind can mainly serve as means for the release of aggression at a hollowed-out society, and it's a record that demands your shoulders to thrash around while driving a bit too recklessly in your car.

-Smiling Penis

antimtv.com