Artist: Disbelief
Title: Heal
Type: Album
Label: Massacre

Disbelief are one of those bands that music simply seems to pour from. It took some time for them to get going, but now 20 years on from their initial formation, 'Heal' is the German metallers third album in four years, and their ninth in total, and it represents a big step towards the darkly dramatic. Thomas Ewerhard's creepy comic artwork, depicting a surgeon about to place his bare hands on a part-decomposed skull, is your first indication of this, but it's the ramped-up and bitterly nihilistic lyrics that really seal the deal - "I see you death, cree-ping death". Karsten Jäger's vocals have always sounded like Lemmy Kilmister guzzling on a bag of nails, but here he's toying with monosyllables. When combined with guitarist Witali Weber's denser, filthy black riffs, we find out just how bloody gory Disbelief can really be.

'Eyes Of Horror' trailblazes a path, with cyclical chugging that drips with the venom of Unleashed and the steadily roared oblivion of Obituary. It's a fearsome opening, which 'Isolation' grabs hold of with the drums suddenly accelerating proceedings with a flurry of double-kick and piston-like snare. The theatrics, touched on above, come, not only from the murderous cover versions of Killing Joke's 'Love Like Blood' and Crimson Glory's 'Red Sharks', but also from their own 'The Last-Force Attack' piling on thick layers of emotion by using snatches of gunfire and a head-spinning rhythm, triggering images of war in the way that Hail Of Bullets have done so successfully of late. On the flip side, there's the down-tempo mood-shifter 'The Certainity Of Reality', escaping like a wet fart in a room full of heavies, to endure and a particularly limp version of King Crimson's 'Welcome Home'.

With three covers and a re-recording of 2002's 'Shine', it's all to easy to look at this as half an album - the opening trio of intelligent bruisers deserve far better than being showcased like this. Perhaps a review of their high-volume output is needed. Then, maybe, they can really offer us a complete work that improves on the promise of 2005's '66sick'.

http://www.myspace.com/disbeliefmetal