System of a Down
Dan Silver at the Astoria, WC2
The Times
April 6, 2005
SYSTEM OF A DOWN are not your run-of-the-mill metal band. As
head-scratchingly eccentric as they are heart-poundingly extreme, the
Californian-based quartet’s unique sound incorporates seemingly
disparate influences including Scandinavian black metal and the
traditional music of the band members’ Armenian ancestral homeland
into a cohesive – if cacophonous – whole. Their lyrics, meanwhile,
veer wildly from the obliquely personal to the overtly political –
usually within the space of the same song, and sometimes even the
same line.
The band have clearly struck a chord, though; the combined sales of
their first three albums come in just shy of the 10 million mark, and
they’ve already sold out three summer shows at the Brixton Academy.
Either side of those dates are two headlining appearances that
demonstrate the dichotomy at the band’s heart: one will close
Donington’s Download festival and the other Souls 2005, a Los
Angeles charity gig commemorating the 90th anniversary of the
Armenian genocide perpetrated by the Ottoman Empire during the First
World War.
They also have two new albums, entitled Mezmerize and Hypnotize, due
to be released, Kill Bill style, six months apart, although only a
couple of compositions received an early airing at this white-hot
warm-up show. Perhaps inevitably they were informed by recent events
in the Middle East – the guitarist Daron Malakian has relatives in
the region – with particular scorn reserved for George W. Bush. BYOB
equated the invasion of Iraq to an apocalyptic party, the singer Serj
Tankian describing the Allied troops “dancing in the desert, blowing
up the sunshine”, before angrily asking, “Why don’t the presidents
fight the war? Why do they always send the poor?”
The soundtrack to that scathing commentary was a testing torrent of
thrashing riffs interspersed with snatches of melody, and therein
lies a problem that has dogged System of a Down from day one. While
they have plenty of worth to say, the message is often missed amid
the maelstrom.
Elsewhere, Roulette saw Tankian and Malakian harmonising exquisitely
over delicately picked folk guitar, Bounce, a hyperactive paean to
pogoing, provoked the desired response from the fans. It all made for
a compelling – if challenging – performance.