SUNDAY TELEGRAPH(LONDON)
June 12, 2005, Sunday

Strange power

BY Ben Thompson

System of a Down Smog

Imagine Jimi Hendrix has been magically brought back to life and you
are taking him on a voyage of discovery to find out how far rock ‘n’
roll has come (or, more accurately, not come) in the 35 years since
his tragically early demise. There is probably only one band in the
world at the moment with the power to make the great man scratch his
head in appreciative bewilderment and wonder “How on earth did that
happen?” That band is System of a Down.

On Sunday, at the third of three sold-out shows at the Brixton
Academy, this maverick Armenian-American heavy-rock quartet scales
improbable heights of frenetic precision. Playing in front of
fairground distorting mirrors which intensify the already
hallucinogenic vigour of their performance, they take a series of
disparate musical ingredients – Armenian folk styles, elements of
electro-pop, funk and rap (with the occasional Dire Straits or Wham
cover thrown in, just to keep the crowd on their toes) – and mix them
together in a very large and very metallic cauldron. The sound that
results is utterly, savagely distinctive.

Shaven-headed drummer John Dolmoyan blurs the line between human
beat-keeper and well-oiled piece of industrial machinery. His partner
in rhythm, the excellently named Shavo Odadjian, plays bass-lines as
fluid and sinuous as the plaited beard which stretches down from his
chin to his midriff. But it’s the very human entanglement of two
contrasting front-people which – as with Lennon and McCartney, Page
and Plant or Peters & Lee – makes System of a Down truly special.

Singer Serj Tankian cultivates the demeanour of an Old Testament
prophet and looks like Antony Sher playing the lead in a Frank Zappa
biopic. With his thinning hair, slightly bulging eyes and undying
admiration for the early works of Iron Maiden, guitarist Daron
Malakian initially seems a rather less imposing character, but he is
hugely talented. Not only can he play the guitar like five or six
different people at once, he also writes songs that have tunes. And
good ones, too; the kind that 4,000 people are happy to sing along
with, even though Mezmerize, the album they’re taken from, has only
been out for a couple of weeks.

Lyrics such as “What is in us that turns a deaf ear to the cries of
human suffering?” or “Eloquence belongs to the conqueror” may not be
conventional karaoke material, but that doesn’t seem to bother anyone
in this crowd. And by the time this performance reaches a thunderous
climax with “Toxicity”, the band’s signature 2001 eco-anthem (sample
lyric: “Eating seeds is a pastime/activity”), System of a Down’s
battle cry – “Somewhere between sacred silence and sleep, Disorder!
Disorder! Disorder!” – makes an irresistible kind of sense.

THOUGH HIS records have yet to sell in quite the seven-figure
quantities that System of a Down’s do, any list of America’s five
greatest living songwriters which didn’t include Smog’s Bill Callahan
would be based on a fundamental misconception. This master of the
lugubrious aperu takes to the Islington Academy stage on Thursday
night with the brittle assurance of a first-year student in an Ivy
League tutorial. As opening figures of speech go, Callahan’s “With
the grace of a corpse in a rip-tide…” certainly puts down a marker.
And before the main body of his set concludes with a much loved
earlier song about “letting himself be held like a big old baby”, he
and his band have ambled the gamut from death to life, from the rush
of a tidal race to the stillness of sleeping horses.