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System of a Down thrills fans of its abstract metal

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  • System of a Down thrills fans of its abstract metal

    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.
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