Disturbing the peace

By REBECCA BARRY

When you're the lead singer of a metal band, admitting you once set fire to a rabbi's van might not quell the common belief that you make the devil's music. But Disturbed frontman and one-time teenage arsonist David Draiman doesn't care.

He just wants people to believe - in anything.

Four religious symbols adorn the cover of the Chicago band's second album, called Believe "because we live in an age where people believe in nothing".

What Draiman believes in is metal. "It's honest. It's not talking about fairytale worlds, at least not the type of metal we write."

Disturbed draw inspiration from a time when metal legends Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin and Metallica's grand lyrics and cathartic melodies granted them god-like presence on stage.

Draiman wants similar reverence, using the words power, intensity and empowerment to describe Disturbed's live shows. While there are subtle amusements to be found in their music (Breathe, a song about a serial killer, must be listened to with a grain of salt), Disturbed come across as serious and majestic, with intricate musical flourishes, combining a progressive, Tool-like quality with an old-school metal sound.

"We don't do jumping jacks on stage," he says. "We try and perform in the tradition of what metal started as, from the early days of British bands that came out of Birmingham, England."

Like the metal gods of old, Draiman's lyrics can be boastful.

"Let me enlighten you," he sings in Prayer, written in response to theologians' commentaries on September 11.

"Instead of trying to bring some sort of sense of understanding and peace after the disaster, they said, 'God is punishing you because you're an evil and sinful people'. I thought that was the most irresponsible and ridiculous thing for a shepherd of his flock to tell his flock after the flock had been decimated."

In many ways, Draiman himself is like a wayward shepherd. He grew up in an Orthodox Jewish home, trained as a cantor in the congregation and was expelled from five high schools.

"I used to set other guys up in the school on dates so they accused me of pimping. I'd sneak them out to see questionable films. One night during a Jewish festival the rabbis got drunk and the head rabbi clocked me in the face in his drunken stupor. In retaliation I took the wheels off his van and rolled them down the hill into the lake."

Needless to say, the rabbi suspected the culprit and gave him a long detention. So Draiman doused the van in petrol and struck a match.

Any normal teenager shipped off to boarding school and deprived of a normal life would have done the same, he says.

"Human beings are equipped with a gag reflex for when something is stuffed down their throats."

Perhaps it was this instinct that led him to concern himself with the world's bigger questions, first by obtaining degrees in political science, philosophy and business, then by auditioning for Disturbed.

Six years ago, the instrumentalists of a heavy, Pantera-style band Dan Donegan (guitar), Fuzz (bass) and Mike Wengren (drums) ran an ad for a singer in a Chicago music rag. It was answered by a well-educated health care worker: Draiman, a singer experienced in punk rock and funk rock but who'd never sung in a metal band.

"I was actually quite intimidated. I didn't know if I could complement their sound and in actual fact at the beginning I couldn't. We'd play three-hour sets and at the end of it, I'd have a quarter of my voice left."

Draiman soon mastered the art of metal singing, bringing a distinctive, throaty style to the band and by 2000 Disturbed had released their multi-platinum selling debut, The Sickness, on Giant Records.

With Believe, released on Warner Music, they aim to bring back the majesty of metal.

"Metal for so long has had this stigma attached to it, almost something that is meant to be laughed at," says Draiman. "Even the major labels who've signed heavy metal bands that became a phenomenon didn't like what they were dealing with. The time has come for metal to stop being a joke. We want to write the kinds of records that the members of Sabbath and Metallica would put on and smile at."

Perhaps the kind of records even the rabbis would be proud of.

* Disturbed play tonight at St James Theatre, Auckland.