|
The following information is from: http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/news/magazine/daily/11623746.htm
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.
By Patrick Berkery for the Inquirer
Submitted by jumppogo
|
