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Disbelief > Shine > Reviews
Disbelief - Shine

Disbelief shine on this album!! - 84%

caspian, February 4th, 2007

Disbelief are a German band, signed to a fairly big label, but a band I had never heard of, until I bought this CD on a whim. It being a German band, I was expecting some sort of super happy Power Metal, or something along those lines . But it turns out that I was getting something much more unique and interesting then that, as this is an album full of dense, claustrophobic mid tempo stuff.

Disbelief's sound is pretty unique. Sure, it's not the most interesting ambient-jazz-speed-doom hybrid, but it's certainly not bog standard death metal either. The songs are all fairly mid tempo beasts, with a lot of layering and some nice, subtle melodies here and there. There's no solos, and the rythym section is always plowing straight ahead, giving everything a bit of a death march kinda feel. Everything has a very melancholic feel, and combined with the despair filled screams of the vocalist, makes this album a very emotional one indeed. It's hard to think of a good comparison, but I guess the closest one would be Cult of Luna sped up a bit and stripped of all their clean parts.

There's not really a huge amount of variety here, but you'll be surprised by a few songs. Me and My World has a dark, stormy piano intro that's epic and real awesome, full of low, crashing chords and some good melody. Free starts of quite lush.. and stays that way, for a quite pretty ending. It is a bit of an anticlimactic way to end the album, but I still dug it. Falling Without Reason has Disbelief dropping the tempo a bit, to great effect, making everything just that little bit heavier and even more melancholy then usual.

So, to sum up: This album is very good! I guess the one complaint is that many of the riffs sound similar, which is probably a consequence of playing most of the tunes in the same tempo, with similar feels to each of the songs. A bit more variation in tempo and feel would be good, that's for sure. Nonetheless, I really liked this album, and I think most other people will dig it too.