DISTURBED
Ten Thousand Fists
Reprise Records 2005
www.disturbed1.com

Live Disturbed pics

What’s the 4-1-1?
The rockers who got down with the sickness and then told the world to liberate are back! They’ve endured a change in bassists but the rock/metal mix remains loud and proud.

Genre
Hard rock / heavy metal

The Good
You can call me pretty surprised to find myself actually liking a cover song. I felt that Disturbed’s cover of the Genesis song “Land Of Confusion” is rather aptly timed social commentary on the current mood of the country. I’ll leave all that to the side of course, but the band does justice to the song even with the amped up music. The band almost never slows down on this CD moving fast and quick from one rocking track to the next. A few of the tracks on Ten Thousand Fists feature politically charged/themed lyrics. Vocalist Dave Draiman does a great job of selling the viewpoint of those songs. The band doesn’t forget to combine their lyrical takes with the requisite metal crunch.

There are just so many songs that stand out here that it’s almost unfair not to mention them all. However, the review would be 3 pages long if I did that. The short version is that there are at least 8 tracks on the disc that slap the listener around demanding attention. The slightly expanded version is that I loved the title track, “Just Stop,” and “Sacred Lie.” The best of the bunch has to be the machine gun rattling vocals on “Pain Redefined,” the first song I heard from the album “Guarded,” and my personal favorite track “Sons Of Plunder.”

The Bad
I liked the rhythm of the song “Decadence” but the repetitive nature of the lyrics bugged the hell out of me. The flat track of the CD was “Forgiven.” In the case of “Overburdened” I thought the song was okay in general, but got the feeling that there was just that certain “something” missing needed to make the track a great one.

The Verdict
What really sells this group and album is the reliability of the band’s music. Disturbed reminds me of Iron Maiden. They can release a new album that kind of sort of sounds like the albums in their past catalog, yet they always find a way to give it a fresh new spin so that you don’t feel that it’s just a rehash of their past glories. I wish this album had come out in 2006 so that it would be eligible for the year-end best of list. The song “Sons of Plunder” would definitely be high on the best song list as well. Of all the so-called nu-metal bands that came out from the mid-90’s onward, Disturbed is one of the few that actually managed to make themselves a career profile that can sustain itself beyond the length of the nu-metal fad. Ten Thousand Fists gives the band 3 great albums in a row.

Did You Know?
The noted comic book artists Todd McFarlane and Greg Capullo provided the album cover for Ten Thousand Fists.

Rating: out of 5

-- Jay Roberts