CD Review: Asylum by Disturbed
Turns out it wasn’t the voices in my head I was hearing – it’s the new Disturbed CD.
Don’t know if I was in the perfect mood to listen to this or whether it’s just really that good, but Asylum is a progression for these guys and damn it’s good to hear from ‘em.
With a bloodied grip, “Remnants” leads listeners down a steep path, with (shorter) ghosts of Metallica’s “Orion” or “To Live is To Die.” Bass heavy, slow, mood-setting. As an instrumental it brings you into the album, into the Disturbed environment. The title track (some consider it Part 2 of “Remnants”) punches hard and the dreamscape gets darker and darker.
Every song on “Asylum” pounds home another nail in the buried foundation of a testament to the way the world is in the late summer of 2010. It’s what the band has always been self-tasked with, yet they’ve become more focused and emotionally unrelenting with this their fifth full-length release. Political meanings catch your ears, like spiders grab flies. The band is desperately seeking meaning and even hope, where every direction seems a dead end. It’s a fight against a fatalistic vision many people have as they cling to ropes dangling, breaking strand by strand over the chasm of their lives.
Perhaps, the most personal song on the CD is “The Infected” as it hints of issues you can encounter just sitting at home – or in the asylum. Some clearly magnified by isolation and repetition because they bounce back off the only four walls you see. It’s start also happens to have the quickest speed of the album – I was imagining head > wall, head > wall, over and over.
With its vision of an inability to protect the helpless humans you pledged to protect, “My Child” is the most depressing song here. In the face of perceived or actual judgments from the world, parents sacrifice themselves to keep their children alive, but “every day brings on a hundred ways to fight” to remind the sincere that their efforts aren’t welcome by the masses.
While many will see “Warriors” as a big fuck you from America to the world, it’s also a big fuck you to any forces holding any individual back from what they want to achieve. It’s one of the best on the album. The beginning of “Another Way To Die” unfortunately slows down the momentum that’s built up until it charges ahead again, harder and deeper. The offhand delivery comes from the viewpoint of someone who, far from having lost desire, has too much bubbling inside. It’s a warning to pay attention to the natural forces alive in the world that will kill you before we kill them.
“Sacrifice” and “Innocence” hurt every organ of your body (in a good way, if you know what I mean). “Never Again” adds nothing to the album. Like a bridge between desired destinations, it’s full of musical cliché and rambles even though it’s a short song. And “ISHFWILF,” was a surprise but wasn’t a pleasant one, though I usually drool at the idea of cover songs. While the title is meaningful in context, “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” seems most like five and half minutes of throwaway to an otherwise momentous milestone for the disturbed.
NOTE: Didn’t watch the Decade of Disturbed documentary that comes with hard copy editions of the CD, so can’t say anything about it except to say “Asylum” showcases why these guys stay beloved and new fans keep on finding them. However, it can also be seen and downloaded in multiple formats at the band’s Web site for a limited time (Scroll to the bottom of the linked page.)
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Hmm. Maybe I need to listen to it in proper order. I liked it, but it didn't really grab me the way some of their other stuff does, and most of the song sounded the same to me. Same/similar tempo, same phrasing, even sometimes the same words/lines. Sometimes it seemed like the only way to tell them apart was with the bridges and interludes.