Posted on Thu, May. 12, 2005

System of a Down thrills fans of its abstract metal

By Patrick Berkery

For The Inquirer

Some people apparently don’t have the stomach for metal
abstractionists System of a Down, the Los Angeles quartet that tests
its audience with dizzying musical change-ups and lyrical tangents
that can be too oblique to decipher or too-doomsday to bear.

I proffered an invitation to S.O.A.D.’s sold-out Theatre of Living
Arts show on Tuesday – part of the 10-date Guerrilla Club Tour to
advance its album Mesmerize, out next Tuesday (a companion album,
Hypnotize, is slated for fall) – to a few friends. All profanely
declined.

Something tells me if I invited S.O.A.D. fans to, say, a Wilco show,
they’d pass in a more genteel manner. They might even accept. Because
casting your lot with a band as schizoid as S.O.A.D. suggests that you
have an open mind, and perhaps a morbid curiosity to see how the other
half lives.

That other half, meanwhile, was living just as an outsider might
expect – swept up in the music’s fitful vibe, and utterly floored to
be seeing arguably the most important metal band of the last decade in
such close quarters, even if only for an hour with no encore. And with
just a small, already familiar, sampling of Mesmerize in the set list.

The new single, “B.Y.O.B.,” as in “Bring Your Own Bombs,” was an
explosive opener, and distilled S.O.A.D.’s essence into four
head-spinning minutes.

You got the band’s political agenda (“Why don’t presidents fight the
war?”), and its A.D.D.-like penchant for loading songs with as many as
six distinct sections, which here ranged from Motörhead-style thrash
to Eastern-tinged rhythms to a groove-laden chorus with a melody
reminiscent of Funkadelic’s”One Nation Under a Groove.”

It also featured the band’s most grating trait, singer Serj Tankian’s
mile-a-minute shrieks and screams, juxtaposed with an operatic
sing-speak you might hear in a drama major’s one-man show about Iron
Maiden.

Sure, it’s an acquired taste. But spasmodic numbers like “B.Y.O.B.,”
“Chop Suey,” and “Needles” couldn’t click without that vocal delivery.

The straighter Tankian and the band played it, the more rote the
outcome. “Aerials,” all stock descending crunch and wounded vocals,
was an uncharacteristically average ballad – and for me, the night’s
only stomach-turning moment.