The Washington Post
May 13, 2005 Friday
Final Edition

System of a Down: Some Very Heavy Metal

by Dave McKenna, Special to The Washington Post

There was a big-event aura Wednesday around the 9:30 club, where
System of a Down played a semi-surprise show.

Tickets to see the Southern California quartet, one of the few metal
bands that critics and kids root on with equal vigor, only went on
sale the morning of the concert. Many who made it inside had been on
or around the premises for more than 24 hours by showtime. Though
onstage for just 60 minutes, SOAD made the wait worthwhile,
delivering a performance as pummeling and cathartic as rock gets.

It helped that followers of the band are accustomed to waiting. SOAD,
formed in the mid-1990s by four Armenian American friends, is now on
a short club tour to publicize the upcoming release of not one but
two CDs, “Mezmerize” and “Hypnotize.” SOAD’s 2001 CD, “Toxicity,”
sold millions of copies, produced multiple hit singles and left the
band poised to kick Metallica off the hard-rock throne. To take
advantage of that incredible momentum, SOAD released . . . nothing
new. Now, after a four-year wait, the band is throwing it all at the
fans over the next few months (just as Guns N’ Roses waited four
years before following its career-making smash, “Appetite for
Destruction,” with “Use Your Illusion” Vols. I and II).

For Axl Rose and the boys, the time off was a harbinger of implosion.
Yet based on the 9:30 club show, SOAD has emerged from its hiatus
prepared to assume control of the universe. Though most popular rock
acts avoid political screeds, SOAD is full of ’em, and the fans help
get the message out by memorizing and screaming along with every
word. The show opened with “B.Y.O.B.,” a new tune that rages against
the Iraq invasion. On it, vocalist Serj Tankian, whose wild hair and
beard give him the look of a guy who hasn’t worked since the
Renaissance Festival left town, got the audience to pump fists and
shout lines such as “Why don’t presidents fight the war? Why do they
always send the poor?” (SOAD has donated money and energy toward
creating awareness of the slaughter of Armenians in the Ottoman
Empire during World War I.) The music is far more complex than most
metal. A typical SOAD tune mixes Middle Eastern phrases with
death-metal guitar — think the soundtrack of “Fiddler on the Roof”
done by the Dead Kennedys. Daron Malakian’s opening guitar solo on
“War?” set a “Hava Nagila” mood before bassist Shavo Odadjian and
drummer John Dolmayan kicked in with room-shaking bombast. Tankian
led the crowd in what sounded like a Gregorian chant in the midst of
“Aerials.” During “Toxicity,” the entire room screamed “disorder!”
over and over. On the floor of the club, where members of a sweaty
and tattooed horde had been throttling each other from the start, the
words seemed redundant.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress