Disturbed
Divisive

Those who loved it. Those who hated it. Those who didn’t understand it. Those who discovered it later and those who still need to discover it.

Nu Metal is a subgenre, almost a subculture, as strange as it is fascinating and I can say I have seen it be born, evolve, die, and reincarnate. I wouldn’t mention resurrection; it would mean unsettling the sacred and it’s not appropriate.

After Kurt’s death, the high wave of grunge reduced to foam on the shore, alternative became predictable and that’s where it all began. That’s where the current insinuated itself.

Korn and Deftones, the fathers. And then Slipknot, Drowning Pool, Linkin Park, Limp Bizkit, Papa Roach, System of a Down, to name a few but not all. The rapping, the new wave, the hardcore punk. Seven-string guitars, palm muting galore, synthesizers, and polyrhythmic drummers. There was (and still is) all of this. There was also Ozzy’s blessing, who wanted nu metal for himself at his party.

More than twenty years ago, I fell head over heels for it. I was in the time of a great first love ended, the failure of the best friendship because of a woman, everything replaced with rebound relationships and towing friendships. We were full of hormones eager for revenge, pissed off about what had happened and what we wanted to continue and about how the world was going, which we had to change in our own way (for this, there was also RATM, angrier than us). We jammed our fingers on the court with the faded Spalding, got into minor scuffles under the basket because the girl we liked (and the opponent also liked) had come to watch us. We bought Fast and Furious gear for our first car in installments, which cost much more than the car itself in installments.

In short, we needed that stuff. We needed nu metal. We needed Chester Bennington’s angry screams interspersed with Mike Shinoda’s rapping. We loved Coby “Dick” Shaddix’s lock of hair screaming into the fish-eye lens of the camera, invoking the Last Resort. We wore the red New Era backwards, like that crazy Fred Durst, who jumped on stage making the steering wheel gesture (we liked it much less at Woodstock '99 when he crowd surfed with a piece of metal underfoot. But that’s another story). We liked that Armenian guy with his crazy vocalizations (“La la la lalalaaaa”) that we tried to imitate. We liked the Hellraiser-style masks and horror movie of Slipknot and Sully Erna’s sleeveless vest, the guy from Boston who seemed like he’d just come out from under the car after trying his first oil change of his life.

And we really liked David Draiman, with that aggressive look, crescent earrings hanging from his chin, the long black Matrix-type coat, and the pendant with a pentacle, crescent, and Christian cross. With his hoarse voice that resembles a mild demon, the guttural roars like a rabid monkey, and the amazing melody in antithesis that seems to remind us that after anger, tranquility comes anyway. Disturbed were (and are) part of all this, especially at the beginning of their journey and with the first album “The Sickness.” Everything I listed above was there, even the rapping, which is only a memory today on its twentieth anniversary.

The four from Chicago drove me (and still do) crazy. Their style, their mascot, “The Guy,” which is undeniably brashly inspired by Maiden’s Eddie but still has a character of its own. Each cover is a small artwork masterpiece and each record is its own story but always with grit and character. Even with some evident flaws.

Their eighth album has just come out and for me, it’s pure enjoyment. It’s a breath of mountain air after a semi-intoxication from an exhaust pipe during rush hour. You know when the band you grew up with goes down a damp and dark path that apparently leads nowhere? A really bad feeling. It happened a few years ago after the release of Immortalized and Evolution.

It's true, Evolution brought us the award-winning cover of “The Sound of Silence,” with the duet with Myles Kennedy making everything even more sensational and accessible even to listeners of supposedly rock radio stations, who didn’t even know who Simon and Garfunkel were. But the disappointment had nonetheless taken root.

“Divisive” brought light back to the path, removed the humidity, and got us back on track. The cover had already excited me, the album’s duration a little less but we know that substance counts.

“Hey you,” the first single, already hinted at something, even if two seasoned ears from the nineties (passing through the eighties) know very well that launch singles serve the Majors like a fragrant bait on a very sharp hook. But we are in the twenties of the new millennium and things have evidently changed. The record flows wonderfully, Dave Draiman is as angry as twenty years ago, scratches and caresses like then but with the vocal maturity of an almost fifty-year-old, not disturbed at all and evidently born for this job. Dan Donegan bends the strings like a madman, John Moyer raises his bass and Mike Wengren dusts off the double pedal and becomes the absolute protagonist of every piece.

In the comments below the first video released (that of “Hey You”), Draiman wrote:

“It's a wake up call. We’ve become our own worst enemies. Civil discourse has become the exception instead of the norm. People have lost themselves in outrage addiction”

This is the common thread of the album, condemning humanity’s ills and its tendency toward self-destruction. A theme that has characterized all Disturbed’s works, made of messages of peace, albeit delivered with energetic and musically aggressive episodes. The fifth track, “Love to Hate,” already eloquent in the title and significant in the chorus, summarizes and reiterates the concept:

“Why do we love to hate?

Such depravity in humanity is common

Why do we love to hate?

This insanity, now embedded in our hearts”

The most powerful tracks, besides the aforementioned “Hey You,” are “Bad Man,” “Unstoppable” (the second single), and the closing “Won’t back down,” which bring back the metal of the origins. “Part of Me” is the speed metal track that echoes Draiman’s characteristic demonic roar in the chorus, which I personally adore.

In “Feeding the Fire,” the specter of the loop returns, which was (a little) joy and (much) pain in the pieces that in the past bent the band’s trajectory downward. But the pollution of the great work that has been done is overall mild. The title track “Divisive” is the classic Disturbed piece that inevitably feels already heard. But how nice it is to find beautiful things again.

I loved “Don’t Tell Me,” a ballad performed with the collaboration of Ann Wilson, a multi-instrumentalist and voice of Heart. At times thrilling but without losing tone thanks to Donegan’s riffs between the duets.

I would have given one less star to this “Divisive,” for the loop I mentioned before (limited to one song) and for only thirty-seven minutes of music. But if the first thing is negligible, the second can be seen positively: quality over quantity, especially if it makes us understand that what has been done in twenty years has not been lost never to return.

Long live bands like Disturbed, which, along with others and without too many words, kept us afloat when everything seemed lost.