Review Summary: Hello darkness, my old friend. I’ve come to talk with you again.
Opinions change depending on where you are. The opinion, “I like Disturbed”, may get a different response on where you are. If you’re at a Disturbed concert, people may chime in with you and agree. If you yell this out loud at a restaurant, people may either look at you funny, or just not care and continue with their business. Saying it on the internet however, and you’ll be mostly met with a negative reaction of people telling you to listen to better music, and how you’re probably no older than 10. Knowing full well people may mock me, and spam me for saying this, I’m going to be honest with you guys: I like Disturbed. Which is why I hate this album. Between the days of
The Sickness all the way up to
Asylum, I have enjoyed and even benefitted from the works of Disturbed. I know they’re not really “great”, and I know that there is much better metal out there, but Disturbed was my introduction to metal, and without them I probably wouldn’t have listened to the likes of Iron Maiden or Megadeth, and maybe not even have found this site. Most of my friends who grew up with me and Disturbed complained that the reason this album failed was because Disturbed had changed their sound too much, making it seem too commercial, when in actuality, the opposite is true. They haven’t changed their sound at all, and that’s the problem.
The first two songs from the album,
Immortalized and
The Vengeful One showed signs of promise, with the title-track giving off an anthmatic vibe that excites you that after their four year hiatus, Disturbed has finally returned, and
The Vengeful One is easily Disturbed’s heaviest song to date, and also has a pretty nice solo. But it’s all downhill from here. What changes was I expecting from a Disturbed album you may ask? Four years of practice and taking a break should’ve been more than enough time for the band to come up with new ideas for songs. Perhaps, longer and faster songs? Maybe a ballad or two? Maybe some actual five or six minute long guitar solos? No, we get none of these except for the closest thing of a ballad we get is a cover song of Simon and Garfunkel’s
The Sound of Silence. It’s actually very good, and it proves that David Draiman’s vocals can fit a ballad, even though he didn’t actually write it. Hardly any of the songs go above the four-to-five minute mark, and honestly, I can’t tell any of these songs apart, excluding the three songs I mentioned earlier.
This album also contains some of the worst lyrics I’ve heard in a metal album.
Fire It Up is honest to God the most boring metal song I heard, and all it basically boils down to is Draiman repeating over and over again how much he loves weed. It doesn’t shock me because you would have to be high to write this song, and you’d have to be high to enjoy it too. Take this excerpt from the song as an example of the laziness on this album:
All I need is a bit of illumination
So the rhythm can no longer run and hide
When I take a puff from the leaves of the devil
And it carries me to the other side
Fire it up, I like to fire it up
And it feels so right
First off, the lyrics don’t fit the band at all. The song isn’t heavy in the slightest, and if you’re not laughing at how bad the lyrics are, then you’re falling asleep to the uninspired guitars and the lack of emotion in Draiman’s voice, which is the opposite of something you want to hear in a song that is literally about “inspiration”.
Immortalized is easily the biggest disappointment of the year for me. Disturbed’s four year long hiatus should’ve brought about changes, but Disturbed sounds the exact same as they did when I first listened to
Believe. But the thing is, I WANT Disturbed to succeed. Most people want Disturbed to leave and never come back, but I want them to improve, and I want to keep listening to new material by them. But if
Immortalized is a sign of what’s to come in Disturbed’s future, then you can count me out. I hope Disturbed can learn to get better in later albums, and we can all look back at this as an album that just played it safe before Disturbed started to embrace changes. But we all know that won’t happen.
Recommended Tracks:
Immortalized
The Vengeful One
The Sound of Silence
