System Of A Down is mad as hell and they're not gonna take it anymore. Teachers, politicians, scientists, cops, groupies and, come to think of it, everyone else, really suck in System of a Down's world. Despite the fact that the band's typical us versus them ideology can make Rage Against The Machine sound plausible by comparison, "Toxicity," the band's newest album, isn't a field recording from the bedroom of a teen who just discovered Marx. Actually, it's one of the few great metal albums released in the Korn Age.
Forget that System Of A Down is often placed in the same "nu-metal" genre with bands as stylistically divergent as the Deftones and Slipknot. "Toxicity" is a throwback to old-school album making, where the A&R man claims he doesn't hear a single while the big-name producer tries to coax another overdub out of the band amidst copious amounts of blow. It could be seen as the distant cousin of "Blood Sugar Sex Magik," also a three-year odyssey fashioned by studio overlord Rick Rubin.
Like "Magik," "Toxicity" is both a document of a band making big-time improvements and an L.A. album to the core, rife with hedonistic tension. "I buy my smack/I smack my bitch/Right here in Hollywood," yelps vocalist Serj Tankian on the juvenile anti-drug war rant "Prison Song." From there on out, that's as big of a compliment as their home base gets.
The terrain of the toxic city stretches from backstage drug orgies to the riots at the Staples Center, with a whole lot of prisons in between. "Bounce" is dumb fun, a two-minute riff about a man and his, uh, pogo stick, encountering "unannounced Twister games/[with] players with no names."
|
"Needles" and "Psycho" writhe and dart around like a heroin addict searching for his lost stash. Meanwhile, in "Deer Dance," rogue cops "push the weak around" at the home of the Lakers over a frantic combination of Mediterranean folk and industrial-strength disco.
Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello, after stumbling into one of the "Toxicity" sessions, dubbed it "crazy person music." It's true on two levels: the band has stop-on-a-dime dynamics that are still the musical equivalent of psychosis. System Of A Down, which has everything to gain by keeping things simple, has to be seen as a little crazy too, offering a very risky album when a Fred Durst cameo could have thrust them into Staind-like ubiquity.
As could have a straightforward song about suicide, "Chop Suey!," a flogged metal war horse that the charts indicate hasn't seen its last lash. "Chop Suey!" proves there's nothing linear about cracking up. Tankian's vocals and the voices in his head are in a death match until they harmonize over a labyrinthine piano riff with the chorus: "I cry/When angels deserve to die." Unlike most misery rock, there's no easy catharsis or hooks, and best of all, no unintended hilarity.
|
Which is not to say the 44 minutes of "Toxicity" are not without their moments of levity. "Psycho" comforts coke-addled hangers-on, claiming "you don't have to be a ho/To see the show." And occasionally, Tankian will find a glimmer of hope among the radioactivity, claiming "spirit moves through all things."
Despite how messed up it truly is, this band wants the world and it wants it now. And the members aren't going to let little things like guitar solos get in the way; there's rarely a few seconds that go by without words. System Of A Down is obsessed with momentum on its sophomore effort. Forget what the new Tool album taught you; "Toxicity" proves complex rock doesn't need to involve bathroom breaks. Although not every tune has the novel arrangement of "Chop Suey!," the band makes sure things never get boring. The band's favorite trick is inserting their ethnic roots in the damnedest places, like infusing Armenian melodies into "Jet Pilot," which manages to sound like folk and punk at the same time.
Everything keeps barreling downhill until the opening notes to "ATWA," which finds Tankian doing some true-to-life singing of an actual melody. After giving you a few scant seconds to breathe, the chorus is a sheer sonic piledriver as he croaks, "You don't care about how I feel!/I don't feel it anymore!" like an agitated version of one of those curmudgeonly old guys on the Muppet Show. In the album's best hook, he manages to roll a non-existent "r" in the word "it." Supposedly, the song is about Charles Manson's views on the environment, but the real story is how the band managed to rock your feeble world in three minutes flat.
Whether breaking new ground on "Chop Suey!" and "ATWA" or digging their heels in on the two-minute punk fusillades, System Of A Down makes one thing clear: it's not taking guff from no one, particularly its peers, who peddle non-specific rage and thrice-heated grunge riffs, and critics who whine against teen America's embrace of nu-metal. "Toxicity" is a triumph that proves that it isn't the genre that's flawed; it's the bands, stupid.
Read More
The best albums of 2014
By Noah Zeidman | December 4, 2014Across genres, it has been a pretty great year in music.
Top 10 movies of 2014
December 4, 2014This has been an excellent year for film, offering everything from gripping blockbusters to innovative personal films.
Iggy Azalea is “Reclassified”
December 4, 2014It has become common practice among music artists to repackage their albums in an effort to simultaneously boost single sales and dish out new content by slightly renaming the album or slapping “Deluxe” onto the title.
