This will be the first in a new segment I want to start. Essentially, I will be revisiting artists that I began listening to ten years ago, both as sort of a commemoration of that anniversary and to review their music as a whole, with a pair of fresh, ten-years-older, and perhaps a bit more seasoned ears. Basically, I'm asking: "Are these artists still as good as I thought they were in middle school or high school?"
And, as you guessed from the title, the first band I will be tackling is.... (drum roll).... (blast beat)... System of a Down!
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From L to R: John Dolmayan (drums), Daron Malakian (guitar), Serj Tankian (vocals), Shavo Odadjian (bass)
...and I did that off the top of my head, after ten years... |
10 Years Ago
Oh man. Have you ever known a teenager who was fanatically obsessed with a band to the point of annoying everyone they know to death by constantly talking about them? Like, your standard One Direction fangirl or Twenty One Pilots fanboy today? I was ten times worse when it came to System.
As a 13-14 year old kid, just budding in my exploration of popular music, I was eager to find a band with more substance than, say, the usual Linkin Park or (shudder) Crossfade that filled my portable CD player on the school bus. I was also entering a bit of a rebellious stage of my adolescence, too, so if the songs swore or had more mature content, the cooler it would appear to me.
Enter the perfect drug, System of a Down, everyone's favorite Armenian-American, Los Angeles-based, alt-metal superstars. From the stereo in my oldest brother's car and on my friend's iPod on the way to school, I got my first fixes. They were unlike anything my young ears had ever heard. (And I had heard maybe a total of... 10 albums in full?)
Loud, fast, HEAVY, weird, edgy and, most of all, addicting. It was impossible for me to get their sound out of my head. Bite-sized hooks like "They're trying to build a prison!" on Toxicity's "Prison Song" or "Everyone's going to the party, have a real good time" on Mezmerize's "B.Y.O.B."
I was helpless. For the next two or three years, this band absolutely dominated my music tastes as my number one favorite band (much to my parents' chagrin). I gobbled up first Toxicity, then Mezmerize and Hypnotize, then the self-titled debut, and finally the B-sides album Steal This Album! Unfortunately for me, I began getting into them right after they announced a hiatus which, as far as recording anyway, they are on to this day. Because of that, over the course of my fandom I never had any concerts to attend or new albums to get hyped about, and the band's small, 5-album discography wore out quickly. Until I started listening again for the sake of this post, it had been about 7 years since I had listened to any System of a Down.
Listening Now
So how does System of a Down sound 10 years after the fact, my ears loaded with hundreds of other albums in the meantime, metal and otherwise? I've certainly gotten into music a lot heavier, a lot weirder, a lot more political, a lot more Middle Eastern, even. Of course, though, good music isn't defined by superlatives or extremities, so that fact alone doesn't diminish the value of System's music. It just, perhaps, diminishes their novelty in those areas. But how do they stack up now?
My general feeling? I'm conflicted. Let's look at the music in the order I first heard it.
Toxicity
Experiencing this album with fresh ears was, more than the rest I re-listened to, very disappointing. If SOAD will be remembered by music fans generally for any one album 30 years from now, it will be Toxicity. It put them on the map and contains arguably their biggest hits: "Chop Suey!", "Toxicity," and "Aerials."
Indeed, throughout my personal SOAD fandom, Toxicity always seemed like the staple, the masterpiece, the true defining moment for the band.
Now? It sounds extremely simplistic and obnoxious. The songwriting of the album relies on pure, visceral heaviness to affect the listener. Chugging riff after chugging riff, often with no break, as heard in the succession of songs from "Needles" to "Deer Dance" to "Jet Pilot." I'm just beat over the head with one repetitive, mosh-inducing riff after the other.
The more melodic parts of each song are fantastic, like the absolutely celestial harmonies on the outro of "Chop Suey!", the Middle Eastern breakdown on "Science".... there's at least one moment on each song. But they sound secondary, like mechanisms designed solely to keep the listener from getting bored as the band transitions from one riff to the next.
As a teen, I hadn't heard enough music to realize just how simple the guitar work, and often the drumming, are on these songs. So Daron Malakian's songwriting technique was effective on me, since I just wanted what was heavy and head-bang-able. But now, they honestly sound like no theory or composition went into their composition. All signs point to the band's primary form of songwriting being jamming to figure out what will make the guitar make sounds that will get huge arenas of sweaty, drunken dudes to beat the crap out of each other.
So, Toxicity? Flecks of brilliance, but overall very disappointing. But then I continued to their next two albums...
Mezmerize/Hypnotize
System's final two albums, released virtually simultaneously as one double album, were the next ones I listened to in my youth. And 10 years later, these sound fantastic.
The band eased back on the visceral, brawns-over-brain songwriting and focused way more on musicality. We get songs like the polka/Mr. Bungle-inspired "Radio/Video," the 80's synth-driven "Old School Hollywood," the mock 50's rock 'n roll in "Stealing Society," and the straight-up ballad "Lonely Day." Heck, even the lead singles "B.Y.O.B." and "Hypnotize" were centered around their incredibly strong melodies in the choruses.
On top of that, Daron Malakian essentially made his vocal debut on these albums, singing lead vocals for the first time on several tracks. Many critics hated this change, but his contrast to Serj's didactic, nasal, vibrato-laden voice is welcome for me. The two's vocal synergy was apparent to everyone after Toxicity (again, see: "Chop Suey!"), but on these two albums it's the main attraction. Listen to the intertwining lines on the bridge of "Stealing Society," the chorus of "Hypnotize," and the absolutely show-stopping climax to "Question!", maybe their best song, period.
That's not to say these albums aren't riddled with problems themselves: sometimes Daron is a little much, like on "She's Like Heroin," and Serj is still intent on beating half-baked intellectualisms into my skull. But Mezmerize and Hypnotize now stand in my mind as the zenith of the band's career.
Let's look briefly at the last two.
System of a Down
This album is heavy, and that's its main appeal. The production is satisfyingly muddy, heavy, and lo-fi; it sounds like an independent metal production. It's easily their darkest, most disturbed album, with lyrics focusing more on death, nihilism, and anger than politics or banana banana banana terracotta. The songwriting is even more simple than Toxicity and the moments of musicality are fewer and farther between, so that aspect of SOAD's appeal is lost. It does, though, stand up fairly well as a piece of pure nu-metal and everything that awkward, short-lived, red-headed stepchild of a genre stood for.
Steal This Album!
This album is what I wish Toxicity was. This B-sides album was obviously written at the same time as that album; the production and guitar tone even sound identical. This album, though, is just so much weirder, wittier, and more fun. Like Mezmerize and Hypnotize, it focuses on these moments of fun and creativity rather than on heaviness and darkness, like it's two predecessors. It sounds like the band is having a blast screaming about pizza on "Chic 'n Stu" and making up their own tongue twisters on "I-E-A-I-A-I-O."
Unfortunately, these tracks, while fun, are not nearly matured to be very much more substantial than Toxicity. They're just more entertaining.
Now, you may say this preference for their musical, quirky side is an entirely subjective gripe. But again, the chugging heaviness is simply not substantial enough, by any songwriting standards, to be worth anything besides organizing mosh pits as quickly and as easily as possible. There's no technicality to it, no complexity, just speed and energy. Indeed, in this genre that is important, but it isn't enough. Thus, I rely on their weirdness and knack for good melodies to get interested in a song.
The Verdict
I tried to keep this concise, but an analysis of a band's entire career is no small task, especially when this band formed a huge part of my beginnings as a lover of music and I have so much history with them.
All in all, the fact that I found so much to love in the band still was really surprising. I hypothesized that I would be completely over the band at this point, that all of the music would sound as obnoxious and simplistic as I accuse some of it as being. The fact of the matter is they had a really one-of-a-kind winning combination of charisma, killer hook writing, and fantastic chemistry, especially vocally. They're a rare gem in the history of metal--flawed and ugly in a lot of places, yes--but rare all the same. How could any teenager not get addicted to them, I wonder?
| OVERALL SCORE: 7.2 |
| System of a Down – Revisited |
| 1. | System of a Down |
| 2. | Toxicity |
| 3. | Steal This Album! |
| 4. | Mezmerize |
| 5. | Hypnotize |
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| O!HTT's COLORFUL SCORING SYSTEM |
9-10
A classic album, one of the best of all time. |
7-8
I love this album. I'm so glad these musicians were born and made this lovely piece of music for me to enjoy. |
5-6
Yeah, it's passable. It has great moments, but overall underwhelmingly average. |
3-4
Ehh very mediocre or seriously flawed, there's a lot better music out there. |
0-2
Good gravy, why must this album exist? One of the worst collection of sounds that will enter your ears. |
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