66 Sick

Album review

On their sixth studio album, 2005's cleverly titled 66Sick, Germany's Disbelief manage to pull off a quite remarkable creative feat: carrying on with their by now well-established path of mid-paced death metal destruction, while sneakily adopting a few timely nuances from the neighboring nu-metal and deathcore scenes, in accordance with their popularity at the time of this recording. Not to panic, though: new tracks like "Sick," "Floating on High," and "Rewind It All (Death or Glory)" merely touch on nu-metal's hypnotically groovy guitar riffs and the odd bit of clean backdrop singing -- not its incessant whining -- throughout their still quite deathly onslaughts, while offerings such as "Continue From This Point," "Lost in Time," and "Edges," with their added melody and occasional spoken word portions, comprise the sum total borrowed from the deathcore arena. In other words, it's just enough to be noticed and dissected by pinhead critics such as yours truly (was the industrial/ambient throwaway "Mental Signpost" mentioned?) but will likely hardly prove of great concern to most any of the band's fans. Especially since remaining songs like "For God," "Try," the devastating "Crawl," and the gothic-tinged highlight "Atone for All" offer top-notch examples (neither too frenetic, nor too doomy, mostly just right) of Disbelief's fan-approved death metal formula.
© Eduardo Rivadavia /TiVo