Something Borrowed: "Let It Go," Betraying the Martyrs/Idina Menzel

I feel like I may be the only person on the planet that doesn’t love Disney’s Frozen. Everyone I talked to raved about it, and when I finally saw it, I thought it was terribly overrated.

The animation was nice, but it just wasn’t a very good movie — and certainly not up to the standards of a really good Disney animated movie. I thought the first 45 minutes were pretty boring, and the next 45 minutes were just OK. Even the songs that everyone else went crazy over, I thought were a bit overdone.

Which brings me to this cover of “Let It Go” by French deathcore act Betraying the Martyrs. I’m not a fan of the deathcore subgenre, so when I discovered the song, I posted it around mainly as a joke pointed at all my friends who are Frozen devotees. But after a couple of listens, I actually ended up kind of liking it … maybe a little.

The song opens with a piano line that’s familiar enough. I played it in my truck over the weekend with my son, who got all excited upon hearing it. Then the rest of the song came, and he looked at me and said, “really, Daddy?” Yeah, really. After that initial piano comes the heavy riffing and death growls of the vocalist. There’s even a blast beat from the drummer right before the chorus, which drops out to a very Disney-like vocal from the keyboard player. But, truth be told, I kind of like the interplay of that squeaky clean voice and the death growls on the chorus. There’s a wicked riff in the second verse, and the breakdown at the end is pretty cool, too.

There’s a whole YouTube channel dedicated to a guy who does often hilarious Disney versions of metal songs. It’s only fitting that some metal guys return the favor, right? Certainly, you have to give credit where it’s due for some savvy marketing from Betraying the Martyrs or someone connected to the band. If not for the Disney connection, I probably wouldn’t have given the band a click and definitely wouldn’t be writing about them.

It’s likely, too, that this will end up being shared all over the place, even if it’s only by people saying, “eww, listen to what they did to this song.” At one point in the video, the vocalist even winks at the camera, as if letting everyone in on the joke.

Frozen fans will likely be mortified by Betraying the Martyrs’ cover of the movie’s signature song. Me, though, I think the movie might have been a little more interesting with this version.