[Please note: Yes, this album has been covered here before, in 2022. I even used the same player and cover image. I’ve found doing these catalog series that it’s worth reexamining records in context, so I’m doing it again rather than not. Eventually I’ll find a solution for that. Or not. — ed.]

DRT Entertainment was active for five years from 2004-2009. In that time, the New York-based imprint put out a couple Clutch landmarks, this Fu Manchu record, and albums from Gwar, Powerman 5000, Artimus Pyledriver and others. Fu Manchu were coming off their four-album stint on Mammoth Records, and with the three-year break between 2001’s California Crossing (discussed here) — yes, they had their live album, Go for It… Live! (discussed here), in 2003 — and Start the Machine‘s arrival on Sept. 14, 2004, anticipation was high for where the band were headed next as established forerunners of heavy fuzz rock.

There is no other record in their catalog so regularly maligned. California Crossing had been recoreded at Sound City Studios with Nick Raskulinecz and Matt Hyde. As heavy rock goes, it was a major, commercially viable production, and the songs realized in their smoothness and arrangements. Start the Machine takes Fu Manchu further from the raw hardcore punk of their origins and, a productive decade on from their 1994 debut, No One Rides for Free (discussed here), and as their seventh/eighth full-length, I don’t know if it’s the most produced the band would ever sound, because their Century Media days yet lay ahead of them, and production was a big factor there, but with Brian Joseph Dobbs (who had worked with Metallica and Mötley Crüe in the ’90s) at the helm, the 12-track/35-minute outing is missing the impact of the records before it.

The songs are there — “Written in Stone,” “I Can’t Hear You,” “Make Them Believe,” “Today’s Too Soon,” “I Wanna Be,” and so on — but there’s a conflict between the charge of the material, which was nothing new for Fu Manchu, and the sound of the recording that takes the life out of it. Amid some of the tightest songcraft of their career — which is saying something — and the studio full-length debut of drummer Scott Reeder, the first offering from what’s still the current lineup of the band felt like it was aiming for airplay on a radio model that was already well in decline by then. Napster had collapsed already, but music was still being spread around the internet and it dismantled the major label payola structure for radio and press, changing the industry as a whole. Were tracks from Start the Machine the first ones to feature on Fu Manchu‘s MySpace page? I don’t know, but they could’ve been if they weren’t.

Monster Magnet had God Says No in 2000. C.O.C. did America’s Volume Dealer the same year. The expectation was that as bands got bigger and increased their reach — and yes, radio play was a part of how that happened, traditionally — a more accessible sound could serve to grab more attention. Worked for Nirvana, Soundgarden, and entire grunge movement 10 years earlier. Start the Machine feels like it’s representing that moment for Fu Manchu, but the shape of commercialism had changed, and poppy as they might ever get, they were never going to be pop-punk rather than heavy rock. For being their only release on a short-lived imprint, for being regarded as the comedown from their peak output in the late ’90s-2000, and for its divergence in production style, Start the Machine remains an anomaly in their catalog. “Open Your Eyes,” “I Can’t Hear You” or “Written in Stone” might get into a setlist every now and again, but more than two decades on from when it came out, it’s largely passed over.

If that’s your position, I’m not sure I all-the-way agree, but I won’t argue. Again, the greatest strength here is the songs, and certainly there’s ample documented evidence that the lineup of guitarist/vocalist Scott Hill, guitarist Bob Balch, bassist Brad Davis and Reeder on drums weren’t lacking in either sonic presence or hooks. I don’t know how Start the Machine would sound if it had been made in different circumstances, or how involved DRT was in the production/recording decisions, but the band remastered it in 2019 and re-released it through their At the Dojo label, so it’s gotten another look over time, and fair enough. I’m not about to tell you “Hey” or “Understand” are career highlights, but they’re definitely of the ilk, and the way “It’s All the Same” slams in feels like a preface to the heavier turn the band was about to take, while “Out to Sea” reminds of their mell0w/boogie side and hones a jammier feel in just three and a half minutes.

There’s value in Start the Machine, is what I’m saying, and part of that is what it demonstrates in terms of their creative growth and the solidification of their processes. This was where the band became sustainable. It is arguably the tightest record they’ve ever done, and each song adds something to the entirety, even if it’s the familiar start-stop riff style of “I’m Gettin’ Away.” As eras go, it marks the beginning of their maturity, and it shines with an awareness-of-self-and-sound that their earlier material didn’t have and couldn’t have had. As a next step from California Crossing, it felt watered down, but it has aged well, and listening to it now, it offers a take that’s distinct from everything else in the discography.

For that alone, it’s worth a revisit, but the more you hear it and can kind of dig into the performances, the more it reveals, and if that’s Stockholm Syndrome — as happens sometimes — it doesn’t make it less true. If you’re embroiled in this deep dive, if you’ve been keeping up, Start the Machine is an important point in the thread of Fu Manchu‘s tenure. The pace at which they released albums would slow, but their sound would continue to evolve from record to record, and especially as the beginning of Fu Manchu as we know them today, it is a more auspicious moment than it gets credit for being.

As always, I hope you enjoy. Thanks for reading.

—

The Patient Mrs. was away last week in Italy with students. They hit Rome and Florence, and she got back last Saturday overnight, after a day-long hubbub of canceled flights and travel-type BS, but before Ice agents starting hanging around Newark Airport, so I think maybe it’s still a win. It’s been good to have her home. The days are long and empty without her.

The Pecan rode her bike without training wheels for the first time yesterday. She’s eight and a half as of this week, and ready. But it’s a fight to get her to do something she’s nervous about. Her Thursday occupational therapist (as opposed to her Monday one) took her around the parking lot in the nice weather and she did great. You could see she was proud, though she’d never tell you that. You have to read it in her body language.

That’s news about everyone else. I don’t really have news about me. I finished that Quarterly Review — it was alright; last one was smoother in terms of getting through it — and was glad to wipe my desktop clean of to-be-reviewed album folders (there are still 40 or so others sitting there, but these things are relative). I had three Hungarian lessons this week and have a bunch of homework over the weekend, which is fine, and I’ve got records to listen to. C.O.C., Elder, Solace, The Machine (their new one is so good), Neurosis, Truckfighters, Kal-El. I keep hoping the All Them Witches will magically show up, but it hasn’t yet. Ditto that for The Claypool Lennon Delirium. That Kal-El, the C.O.C. and Monks Pond (which is way late) are my next three reviews, but I’m not sure on the order. Monks Pond, Kal-El, C.O.C. maybe? Hell if I know.

Next week, a premiere Monday for Psychedelic Source Records for a project called 🜍, which is the alchemical symbol for sulfur. I can’t put 🜍, or ☉, which is the name of the record (it’s the solar symbol), in a headline and have it show up properly (old WordPress theme stuff), so that will be a thing to navigate, but I’ll figure it out. I have videos from Doom City Festival in Mexico City from Pelican and YOB set to premiere Thursday as well, and hopefully at least two of the three reviews listed above will be done by the time the week is out. We’ll see.

That Neurosis review took a lot out of me yesterday. I woke up at 2AM and was midsentence writing it in my head, so I knew getting back to sleep wasn’t going to happen until it was done. I got up and worked on it until a bit before five, then went back to sleep for a bit. I’m not sure it says everything I wanted to say about how much that band’s music has meant to me over the years or the depth of the trust-betrayal that came with the Scott Kelly fallout, but frankly, I didn’t want to make it all about me either, so I was trying to find a balance.

Zelda update: I did the first three dungeons in The Wind Waker by memory. This is the second quest from the first I finished, I don’t know, maybe a month or two ago. Between mods and cheat codes, I don’t really need to chase down any of the sidequesty stuff that I don’t want to — don’t have to play the minigames to get a heart piece — so I can just relax and enjoy it. I also did a runthrough of the original The Legend of Zelda, just for the hell of it. I remember being six and having a hard time with it, but I’m way more used to block puzzles than I was in 1987.

That’s it for me. I hope you have a safe and awesome weekend, and I appreciate you being here to be a part of this. Fuck fascism, fuck ICE, fuck the IDF, fuck war, the two-party system, defunded education, and capitalism. A better world is possible and no one wants it.

Back Monday with more of exactly this kind of uplift.

FRM.

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Tags: At the Dojo Records, California, DRT Entertainment, Fu Manchu, Fu Manchu Start the Machine, San Clemente, Start the Machine

This entry was posted on Friday, March 27th, 2026 at 10:31 am and is filed under Bootleg Theater. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.