Disturbed: Believe : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

On Believe, the second album by multiplatinum headbangers Disturbed, the band's drill-press metal reveals more of its Eighties roots -- though not with the kind of jackboot thunder one might expect. On machine-gun songs such as "Rise," the Chicago quartet gives a predictable nod to Eighties thrash and Wax Trax Records industrial rock. But Disturbed also embrace a brooding, ultramelodic goth grandeur, a la Tears for Fears' "Shout" and Depeche Mode's "Blasphemous Rumours."

Believe represents a skillful, if calculated, variation on the melodrama-meets-mayhem formula that has been driving the most commercially successful new metal in recent years, from Korn to Staind. David Draiman -- known primarily for grunting and barking like a deeply afflicted Times Square oracle on the band's 2000 debut, The Sickness -- is determined to show his sensitive side, coming on like a shaved-headed power balladeer. He still twitches and froths on the verses, particularly on "Intoxication," but mutates into a ravaged crooner on the choruses. He tenderly caresses lyrics that address "my devastation," in "Remember," and sounds positively dreamy drifting through the belly of the beast in "Mistress."

The staccato grind of Disturbed's debut hasn't been completely abandoned. Draiman squeezes his Old Testament bromides into pretty hate machines -- "Prayer," "Bound" and "Devour" -- as the rhythm section comes on with industrial precision. Andy Wallace's mix gives Mike Wengren's kick drum a John Bonham-like prominence, and Dan Donegan wields his guitar like a percussive hammer. Draiman's newly expressive voice and the moody melodies run neck and neck with the mosh-pit histrionics until the finale, "Darkness" -- the moment when Disturbed morph into a lounge combo. The piano tinkles, the cello swoons and Draiman's mascara starts to run. The singer slips a black leather smoking jacket over his hair shirt and sings a sad little anthem for all the lost goths. At last, new metal has its answer to Depeche Mode's Black Celebration.