Hoobastank - Disappear

Mon 21st Mar, 2005 in Music Reviews

It’s hard to know where to start with Hoobastank. They have quite a history of making recorded songs sound okay while never actually being able to perform them very good live, in fact they have quite a terrible live sound when it comes to Doug Robb’s vocals. So I always seem to listen to their songs with caution always having a horrible thought of how the song really sounded before the sound technicians started playing with it. Nevertheless I attempted to give their new single Disappear a chance to impress me, but unfortunately it didn’t succeed.

Disappear is not a very tempting form of persuasion to go out and buy The Reason album. While the band in recent times have seemed to solely concentrate on writing songs for the radio, Disappear fails to hold much appeal at all. The music attempts to have epic proportions by climaxing towards the end but the music is much too soft and is drowned out by the vocals which comes across as a lifeless version of a Staind song.

The lyrics are probably the only avenue for possible redemption of Disappear, but even they too are fairly average, with the best line being at the very beginning, “There’s a pain that sleeps inside, and it sleeps with just one eye…” After that line it is all pretty much down hill with repetitious lines from songs that you can’t help but feel have been written over and over before.

From my perspective I would like to see the boys from Hoobastank go back to their foundation and make more songs like Crawling in the Dark and Pieces which are found on their first self-titled album because otherwise if they continue with more songs like Disappear they are only going to be feeding the real diehard fans that have managed to stand by them.