System Of A Down - Armenian rage

Their name comes from the fusion of the word "System" and a poem, "Victim of a Down", as if to say "strength united with art". The music of System Of A Down can be recognized in this very contrast.

It's 1993 when Serj Tankian (vocals) and Daron Malakian (guitar), two young men of Armenian descent, meet through their respective bands, which were recording at the same studio in Los Angeles. Their musical tastes converge, and they decide to form a band, Soil, bringing in Shavo Odadjian both as bassist/guitarist and as their manager. The turning point comes in 1995 with the official formation of System Of A Down: Serj and Daron on vocals and guitar respectively, with Shavo now dedicated solely to bass, and the new, definitive addition of John Dolmayan on drums.

The band's Armenian roots play an important role in the nature of their music. Indeed, heavy metal and punk-hardcore (Van Halen and Dead Kennedys are their biggest influences), which form the backbone of System Of A Down, are combined with Middle Eastern-style scales and sonorities, particularly showcased by Serj's versatile voice. In their repertoire, though, you can also find rap lyrics, distortion worthy of thrash-metal, and verses that border on the absurd. In some interludes, you can even detect melancholic gothic touches or para-jazz flourishes.

The period of System Of A Down's early output coincides with the commercialization of crossover, which gave rise to a multitude of so-called nu-metal bands. However, apart from a few shared traits (passages with cadenced vocal rhythms), System Of A Down don't fit into this melting pot, thanks to the wide range of influences that make up their songs.

They certainly can't be compared or put on the same level as Rage Against the Machine, as often happens. One might venture the idea of a kind of replacement: if Serj didn't inherit Zack de la Rocha's musical baton, he may well have inherited his media and political role, fronting a band that's aggressive, politically engaged and unique in its kind.

Their self-titled debut album, System Of A Down, produced by Rick Rubin for American Recordings in 1997, was recorded at Sound City Studios. The band's underlying philosophy is to avoid following a precise sonic line and to leave the project open to all the influences they feel are their own. They had the good fortune of finding Rubin on the same wavelength, who accepted almost all the material as it was presented (making only a few minor-key tweaks) and released the record with minimal arrangements in the final mix. This was also to respect their wish for a "live" sound that could give its best in concert performances.

It's a powerful debut, this 1998 release, still heavily grounded in heavy metal, with the drums playing a key role, standing out through fast, hammering rhythms. Unfortunately, the album as a whole comes across as rather monotonous, and despite hints of the more refined sonorities to come, it feels like an immature work, where some original ideas do surface, but inconsistently and never fully developed. These flashes of talent can be glimpsed above all in "Suggestions" and "Mind". The former anticipates the typical "multiform" musical concept the band would go on to express at its best on their second album, while the latter reveals the interplay between Middle Eastern sounds (played out in crystalline guitar notes) and moments of pure vocal violence. "Spiders", meanwhile, further highlights Serj Tankian's voice, capable of shifting from a fierce scream to, at times, a soft whisper.

The album nonetheless achieves enormous success (nearly a million copies sold, gold record in the US), thanks to the favorable climate for this musical genre at the time and the band's heavy live presence, playing countless shows as support act for major metal acts worldwide.

After three years of growth and stage experience, System Of A Down return in 1998 with the release of Toxicity for a major label, Sony. The 14 tracks span the band members' wide-ranging musical influences, from Slayer to the Beatles, from the Smiths to Depeche Mode, all the way to Pink Floyd.

It kicks off with a bang, with "Prison Song", a track that seems to have been written to show the sheer scale of the new record, a sort of compendium of all the influences the album will go on to absorb, but above all a showcase of the band's near-metal power. While "Needles" veers toward more melodic atmospheres, "Deer Dance", a starkly political song with obsessive, frantic rhythms, feels almost like a return to the raw sound of the debut. After the more "hardcore" pairing of "Jet Pilot" and "X", we reach the album's centerpiece, the single "Chop Suey", the gem of System Of A Down, which perfectly combines the desperate screams of a moving lyric with evocative melodies, distortion with Daron's clean sound, absurd speed with the gentleness of a rare piano passage. The ninth track, "ATWA (Air, Trees, Water, Animals)", inspired by the Charles Manson murders, is another interesting piece, structured as a kind of lullaby alternating with bursts of stammered words and constant rhythm changes. Another track worth noting is "Shimmy", with its Middle Eastern-flavored scales. Finally, a trio of catchier, MTV-ready songs: the other single, "Toxicity", which combines melodic parts with political anger condensed in the shouted chorus, "Aerials", built on the dense interplay between Tankian's voice and Malakian's guitar, and the terrifying "Psycho" (a bizarre story about coke-addled groupies), where Dolmayan shows off his unhinged touch. The hidden track "Arto", meanwhile, offers purely tribal textures courtesy of multi-instrumentalist Arto Tuncboyaciyan, who had previously worked alongside jazz giants such as Al Di Meola, Wayne Shorter and Chet Baker. A curious detail: on the record Tuncboyaciyan played just about everything, from an empty Coca-Cola bottle, to percussion on his own bare chest, to a vase full of water.

The leap forward made with this record is remarkable: besides improving the sound quality, System Of A Down focus on giving the songs more individual character, making them unique, and rightly placing great emphasis on Serj's beautiful voice.

Unfortunately, as often happens with inexperienced bands touched by success, after the Toxicity breakthrough they were in a hurry. In a hurry to repeat themselves? In a hurry for money? In a hurry to make a political statement? Probably a bit of everything, the fact remains that in 2002, just a year later, they released their third album, Steal This Album (American Recordings), taking a clear step backward. While the instrumentally interesting moments drop off drastically, there's a noticeable rise in catchy choruses and immediate hooks. Still, a few sporadic interesting moments do surface, like "Boom", a sort of spoken-word commentary on today's society, or "I-E-A-I-A-I-O", charming and original, with a crescendo of Eastern-tinged chants. The melancholic "Highway Song" also holds up reasonably well. There's a decent attempt at diversification in an acoustic vein ("Ego Brain" and "Roulette"), which however feels out of place on a record that, as its very title suggests, is better off stolen, since it's not worth buying.

Taken as a whole, System Of A Down can be described as a project with real potential, demonstrated above all by Toxicity. Their strength lies in their originality, with a mix of the most varied genres that, in certain cases (Steal This Album), turns into a formula, handy for churning out songs on a continuous loop, even during dry spells of inspiration. They've certainly capitalized on their media success: for money, in some people's opinion, or for political and social purposes, as others believe. The truth lies in everyone's own interpretation, as Serj Tankian himself states, stubbornly resistant to all the labels that keep getting attached to him.

Awaited by fans and critics alike for the trial by fire of their third album (not counting the outtakes collection "Steal This Album"), in 2005 System Of A Down gave birth to Mezmerize, the first part of a project set to be completed six months later with its twin, Hypnotize.

The record proves far more multifaceted than its predecessors: the melodic parts are in some cases almost pop, and the dichotomy between genres becomes more pronounced. After the intro-ballad "Soldier Side", we're hit by the initial fury of "B.Y.O.B.", in which we can already sense the first innovations and the first risks System have chosen to take on this album. Risky, in terms of possible critical backlash, may be the choice to use some more commercial-sounding pop elements in this track to underline a kind of mental disorientation that certain music exerts on young people, concealing from them the many horrors of today's world. The novelty, if it can be called that, lies in the more extensive and constant use of guitarist Daron Malakian's voice, more inclined toward classic metal, alongside the more eclectic and distinctive voice of singer Serj Tankian; although good old Serj, understandably smitten with his own gift, sometimes indulges in vocal runs that are a bit too daring, the choice of this vocal interplay seems to be the album's most successful element. While both "Revenga" and "Cigaro" come in pure S.O.A.D. style, metal drive interrupted by melodic choruses destined to stick in your head, "Radio/Video" is one of the tracks on which System take the biggest risks and, ultimately, one of the best on the record: hard rock is no longer front and center, but instead serves as an interlude to an ethno-folk nursery rhyme that turns into reggae, speeds up into a gypsy dance, and closes with one last burst of power.

If in some musical passages and in the oddities of the lyrics of "This Cocaine Make Me Feel Like I'm On This Song" you can spot an obvious debt to Dead Kennedys, certain passages of "Violent Pornography" and "Sad Statue" undoubtedly call to mind Bad Religion: the result is, regardless, three tracks that, despite a few weak spots, remain thoroughly enjoyable. Hidden among them is the second gem of Mezmerize: it may be one of the less "sophisticated" tracks on the record, but "Question!" is an epic-sounding ballad that showcases the best technical performance from all four band members, first and foremost the excellent drummer John Dolmayan. More distinctive, on the other hand, is "Old School Hollywood", a metal-new wave hybrid in which electronic effects blend perfectly with the drum crescendos and guitar explosions, producing an utterly gripping track and one of the best attempts at sound "innovation" tried out on this album by System Of A Down. The album closes in a mood of bittersweet tenderness with "Lost In Hollywood", a melancholy ballad left entirely to Daron, who, backed by Serj's backing vocals, rails against a gilded world built on falsity and devoid of values, ending the album with a line that certainly lands, but one that - and Malakian and co. know it - could just as well be aimed at a growing portion of their own audience: "All you bitches put your hands in the air and waves like you just don't care".

Mezmerize turns out to be a good record, superbly played, about which plenty can be said: that it's more commercial because more melodic than its predecessors, that it's contradictory in railing against the vacuousness of party-obsessed young minds while using easily digestible melodies to do so - but it also confirms that System Of A Down are a band unafraid to take risks and put themselves on the line. All things considered, then, the Armenian band remains one of the most important forces on the modern metal scene and beyond.

Six months after the release of Mezmerize, System Of A Down complete their much-discussed project by releasing its twin, Hypnotize. Born out of the same sessions as its predecessor, this latest work drags along a string of controversies from every direction, accusing the Armenian rockers of having disguised, behind poorly explained theories, what was in fact a shrewd commercial move. Setting aside the marketing angle, though, and returning to purely musical terms, the record is in many ways similar to its predecessor: short in length (around thirty minutes), made up of tracks in pure S.O.A.D. style alongside others in which Tankian and Malakian's band tries to explore different, more original paths, with a general leaning toward a more melodic approach. Overall, though, this second record is weaker, less cohesive and too scattered, with at least a couple of songs that feel like filler, and with System repeatedly seeming to lose control. Caught up in the urge to constantly shift rhythm and style, Malakian and his bandmates tend to overdo it, producing songs that lose the fluidity and consistency that tracks like "Radio/Video" once had. The singles released say a lot on their own: while "B.Y.O.B." was a track with real drive, whose pop inserts were well blended into the metal structure, "Hypnotize" instead comes across as little more than a harmless rock ballad in which Malakian shows off his voice - though to better effect on Mezmerize's tracks. The opening "Attack" and "Dreaming" are fairly tied to the band's typical sound: built around Dolmayan's furious drumming and Tankian's voice, they flow pleasantly enough, even if the latter loses a bit of steam toward the end.

"King Of Rock'n'Roll" is one of those tracks that could easily be called "filler"; "Stealing Society" and "U-Fig", despite a few interesting moments, are nonetheless songs that are too confused and disjointed, and even after repeated listens leave no mark on the listener. "Tentative" and "Holy Mountain", meanwhile, are solid examples of metal-progressive excursions, though they lack the strength and essential beauty that "Question!" had on the previous album. Next come two tracks in which Malakian and co. seem intent on throwing in everything possible to wow listeners: "Vicinity Of Obscenity", with its alternation of violent metal, near-ethnic rhythms and pop choruses, and "She's Like Heroin", which, thanks in part to its disorienting lyrics, comes across as a divertissement à la Jello Biafra.

In closing out the record, System Of A Down let themselves be swept away once and for all by a more melodic sound, turning out two ballads: "Lonely Day", lighter and more melancholy, and "Soldier Side", a continuation of the intro found on Mezmerize, darker and more despairing.

You get a distinct sense that the undeniable potential of Malakian and Tankian's band is wasted here in an excess of ideas assembled haphazardly, full of eagerness to change (and to astonish), but lacking genuine inspiration. It's hard not to think about the cost, the running time and the quality of this Hypnotize, and then to think of all the controversy that trailed this project, and come away convinced that, with a more careful selection, the band could have dropped many of this record's songs and combined the best of the rest with Mezmerize's tracks into a single album.

Contributions by Gianni Candellari ("Mezmerize-Hypnotize")

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