Amazon.co.uk Review
Waaaargh! East-European death-metal in the area!
System Of A Down, a collection of Los Angeles-based ex-pat Armenians with a serious fetish for beefing up the black-humoured urgency of the
Dead Kennedys into a breed of music so heavy that it attracts small planets as satellites, rather elude the grace of a subtle introduction. Fortunate, then, that an introduction to them is all that you need;
System Of A Down is a near-perfect example of late-1990s metal at its most ridiculous, and of course, heavy metal has always thrived on being the most absurd of all art-forms. "Suggestions", for example, encapsulates many great metal moments; bowel-emptying, mountain-sized riffage twinned with lyrics that crossbreed J.R.R. Tolkein with Karl Marx, sung in a mixture of graveyard-friendly goth baritone and genitals-in-a-vice falsetto. Elsewhere, "Suite-Pee" and "War?" (answer in the affirmative, of course) provide some ass-kicking highlights. Truly, this is a killer album.
--Louis Pattison
CD Description
System of a Down sees itself as being an integral part of anew musical revolution of heavy music. On the surface, the band's manifesto seems tangential to Rage Against the Machine's; but musically SOAD is a groove-metal machine, with a sound that incorporates a punk ethic, Panteraesque riffs, and a schizophrenic vocal approach reminiscent of Mike Patton.
Like a dose of chicken soup for a disconnected moshing youth, SYSTEM OF A DOWN is unrelenting. "Sugar" segues from neo-jazz verses into pounding thrash-core choruses. "Spiders" shows more depth, dynamics, and even poetic, melodic vocals. The production of the album is raw and very close to that ofa live album, surely a deliberate stroke by producer Rick Rubin (who has put many metal bands on the map under his guidance). On "Soil", vocalist Serj Tankian questions the ideology of democracy. With possibly more conspiracy theories thanan episode of THE X-FILES, System of a Down explores the concept of mass influence through technology in "War?" The essence of SYSTEM OF A DOWN can be found in "P.L.U.C.K"; the song's title says it all, an acronym for "politically lying, unholy, cowardly killers".