Ladies and gentlemen, welcome. Make yourselves at home, help yourself to a drink and grab a seat while I shrug off all semblance of objectivity and understatement. Ahh, that’s better, where was I?
I absolutely flicking love System Of A Down! Love, love, love ’em and Toxicity, from 2001 was where it all really clicked into place for them. I absolutely flocking love Toxicity!
I came to SOAD through a pretty unusual route, one of the kids Mrs 1537 taught recommended them to her and leant her their debut. It was quite a thing, I really enjoyed the raw heaviness and the wild pinballing nature of the music but yearned for a bit more melody and finish; I’m old-fashioned like that.
So when Toxicity left the cab rank I was on board, despite the lack of any vinyl release**. It just floored me from the get-go. It had everything I craved, blindingly heavy riffs, astonishing changes of rhythm, powerhouse drumming in excelsis, incredible vocal melodies and real emotional highs to go with all the anger and invention. It was the sound of a band with a thousand ideas trying them all at once and then thinking up a thousand more for the second half of the song.
In short it sounded like most of the heavy LPs I liked best loaded into the Large Hadron Collider and smashed into a wall of Zappa, Faith No More and Armenian folk music albums. The resulting molecular stew then being scooped out and spread thinly on a platter before being baked.
I’m about 57.4% sure that’s how they made Toxicity.
System Of A Down really had an unfair advantage over almost everyone else back then because all four of them were just astonishingly good musicians and by astonishing I mean best in show, none better.
The other thing that really can’t be overstated is just how the band’s identity as Armenian Americans colours their musical palette, gloriously so in fact. It gives them such a different range of references to use.
Today’s favourite track is ‘Deer Dance’ a rant against police brutality in the face of protest that veers between some really sweet melodies and absolute grinding heaviness. Serj Tankian’s vocals on this one are incredible, even by his own lofty standards; growling, crooning, whatever’s needed. That the band slam this track straight into the heavy lunacy of ‘Jet Pilot’ has to be commended.
Elsewhere we get a great track about the prison industry in the US, ‘Prison Song’ where the grim subject matter and facts are leavened by some sweet melodies while the band treat the structure of the song just like a trampoline. Ditto, today’s favourite track ‘Needle Song’ where the ‘tapeworm’ of control/drugs/dependency is the target.
Today’s favourite track^ is the uber-mental orgytastic ‘Bounce’, a former workout tune of mine and just a righteous fun noise. You can almost hear the ghost of Zappa laughing along with it.
It’s all great, the singles ‘Chop Suey!’ and ‘Aerials’ are amazing in their own right, I may just have heard them a couple too many times. The oddly haunting video for the latter gives it a really emotional twist for me, with its call to think bigger. Sometimes listening to this music is very much like clinging to the shore in a raging torrent, it can buffet you until you just have to let go and trust it.
Life is a waterfall We're one in the river And one again after the fall Swimming through the void, we hear the word We lose ourselves, but we find it all (Aerials)
Nobody else out there sounds like System Of A Down, nobody out there could sound like System Of A Down and I wonder if it is because of that the band never really seem to get the love they should. Maybe it is why folk occasionally lump them in with the evil twins of all that is despicable and wrong, nu-metal and rap metal.
The band’s extraordinary range and their often oblique lyrical take on politics sets them way apart from their peers, it has more in common with various 60’s subversives like the Fugs and Zappa (in non-smut mode) than anything more contemporary. Toxicity is a great way to dive into the deep end of their oeuvre.
Listening to it again a few times recently I am struck again and again by just how heavy an LP Toxicity is, released a week before 9/11 this is unsurprising. Imagine what they could sound like now in our fractured times? their music perfectly matching our more splintered, ADHD inflected discourse. Time to grab hold of your tapeworms and pull folks!
Pull the tapeworm out of your ass, Hey! Pull the tapeworm out of your ass, Hey! Pull the tapeworm out of your ass, Hey! Pull the tapeworm out of me...
1131 Down.
PS: Chop Suey!
**SOAD were a right bunch of SODS on that front, I think their first were the very limited picture disc versions of Mesmerize and Hypnotize in 2005.
^yeah, I know, 3 favourite tracks today and counting; Toxicity is just that kind of LP where every track that comes on is my favourite^^
^^PJ Harvey To Bring You My Love is the other album that always does that to me too.