May '05 Revolver Magazine Article
Posted by musicbox on Wednesday, March 30, 2005 - 10:44 PM
System of a Down has just gotten themselves o­n the cover of another magazine. Over o­n Malakians' coffee table, a stack of notebook pages covered in the guitarist's scrawl offers proof that he's been extremely busy, indeed. Each piece of paper lists a different track order for the forthcoming Hypnotize/Mezmerize (Columbia), the first System of a Down record since 2002's Platinum Steal This Album. As he did with all of SOAD's previous albums-Steal, 2001's Toxicity, and 1998's self titled debut-Malakian has spent countless hours trying to compile the perfect song sequence for Hypnotize/Mezmerize. But it's managed to elude him thus far, and the fact that Hypnotize/Mezmerize happens to be a double album makes his task all the more frustrating. "It's driving me up the wall," he admits. "I love days like this," says Daron Malakian, gazing out the window of his den at the torrential February rains soaking his Glendale neghborhood. All across the greater Los Angeles area, people are bitterly cursing the storm, which has already been responsible for numerous mudslides and road closures. But for Malakian, the wet winter weather just serves as another excuse to stay at home and do what he does best: play guitar and write songs for System of a Down ! "I don't go out much, ever," he says, exhaling o­ne of the many bong hits he'll take this afternoon. "When I was in my early twenties, I used to love going out, but now I'm just really focuse o­n doing what I do, I guess. When I find myself somewhere where I'm not doing something constructive with music, I feel like, What am I doing here? I'm wasting my time!". Over o­n Malakians' coffee table, a stack of notebook pages covered in the guitarist's scrawl offers proof that he's been extremely busy, indeed. Each piece of paper lists a different track order for the forthcoming Hypnotize/Mezmerize (Columbia), the first System of a Down record since 2002's Platinum Steal This Album. As he did with all of SOAD's previous albums-Steal, 2001's Toxicity, and 1998's self titled debut-Malakian has spent countless hours trying to compile the perfect song sequence for Hypnotize/Mezmerize. But it's managed to elude him thus far, and the fact that Hypnotize/Mezmerize happens to be a double album makes his task all the more frustrating. "It's driving me up the wall," he admits. And yet, despite its unconventional format and overall length, Hypnotize/Mezmerize isn't meant to give the finger to the music biz or test the limits of fan endurance wich an arrogant display of jusical self-indulgence. Like every Syste record before it, Hypnotize/Mezmerize is ultimately about good songs. Only this time, there are more of them-and they're simultaneously the most accessible and most challenging tracks the band has ever recorded.<TABLE id=table3 style="BORDER-COLLAPSE: collapse" width="100%" border=0>
<IMG height=196 src="http://soadfans.com/CO/rc1da.jpg" width=280 border=0>	Why are System of a Down releasing a double album? And why are they splitting the album into two separate halves, the first of which will be released this May, the second around Christmas? Well, to paraphrase the old adage about the dog that licks his balls, they're doing it because they can. Together for a decade, the intense creative partnership of Malakian, vocalist Serj Tankian, bassist Shavo Odadjian, and drummer John Dolmayan has sold millions of records for Rick Rubin's Sony-distributed American Recordings imprint, and established a rabid wolrdwide audience for the band's genre-smashing, sociopolitically consious brand of hard rock. With that kind of enviable commercial and artistic track record, SOAD have pretty much earned the right to do as they please when it comes to releasing new music.

"BYOB," tentatively slated to be the album's first single, slams like an unholy cross between Led Zeppelin and Cro-Mags. But it also features a chorus so sublimely poppy, Mark McGrath and Sugar Ray would gladly trade a lifetime's supply of hair gel for it, and its devastating closing chant of "Why don't presidents fight the war?/Why do they always send the poor?" shows that the band has los none of its daring lyrical edge.

Among other Hypnotize/Mezmerize highlights are "Vicinity," which mixes a party-hearty Seventies disco groove with schizoid tempo shifts and brain-frying guitar feedback,
and "Questin," which layers jangling acoustic guitars and a haunting minor-key melody over jazzy beats before veering into a crushingly heavy refrain.
"Attack" is first-pumping, Iron Maiden-style power metal, while Malakian's piercingly high vocals o­n the stomping "Hypnotized" would make Rob Halford doff his leather cap in appreciation.

In fact, Malakian's vocals o­n Hypnotize/Mezmerize are far more prominent than they've been o­n any previous System record. In addition to trading lines with Tankian o­n the majority of the tracks, Malakian takes the lead o­n several songs, including "Lonely Day," which is easily the most straightforward song the band has ever recorded.
A mino-key rock ballad built around Malakian's plaintive pledge of "And if you go/I want to go with you/And if you die/I want to die with you" and capped with dizzying guitar solo, "Lonely Day" sounds a little like Green Day would if Billie Joe Armstrong had grown up o­n a steady diet of late-Seventies Scorpions and UFO recordings.

"I don't want to re-create what System have done before-I want to build off it," Malakian explains.
"Serj is an amazing vocalist, but we've always bounced vocal ideas off each other, and me singing is just another natual mutation o­n the sound. I also had more of a hand in the lyrics this time around. Before, I would leave a lot of space for Serj to write lyrics. But since I had my own personal situations that I was dealing with this time, I kind of said, 'These are the lyrics.' And he respected that."

Whether he's riffing his way through a thrashy chord progression, or just discussing the finer points of British rock legends the Kinks, Malakian radiates a burning intensity that can initially be intimidating, though he's also prone to break into a disarming, high-pitched chuckle when he finds something funny. But there's no laughing when he mentions his concern for the safety of his relatives who live in Iraq, o­ne of the many "personal situations" that influenced his writing o­n Hypnotize/Mezmerize.
"That's a big part of the stress o­n my family," he says. "But just looking at the way the world is right now-that bums me out more than just my family being in Iraq. I mean, 200,000 people die in the tsunami, right? And motherfuckers are still bombing each other! It's like, don't you see what's possible? We should be able to combine our strenghts to try and find o­ne thing that can save us from global warming, all of that shit. And instead,we're throwing bombs o­n the earth, polluting it more. It doesn't make sense to me."

The song "Hypnotize," Malakian says, was inspired by his frustration with those who would rather blindly follow their leaders than think for themselves, as well as the propaganda-spouting pundits who reinforce their behavior.
"It just feels like we're outnumbered by zombies, you know? I'm not just saying that it's that way in the United States-I'm talking about all over the world. The people who are going and killing themselves in suicide bombings, that's just as stupid to me as people voting for Bush. So i sit in the middle. I'm not anti-American or anit-anything-I'm just anti-dumb-ass motherfuckers!"

Malakian has two large framed posters hanging in his den: a promo poster for Venom's Black Metal album and a blakc-and-white photo of John Lennon.
Though System of a Down have recieved plenty of praise (and gotten a ton of stick) for their fearless political stances, the guitarist says he admires Lennon's ability to move beyond political affiliations and boundries and connect with people o­n a depper personal level.
"I see us as a socially conscious band, not just a political band," he explains. "The guy sitting in his car waitin for his girl, while there's a world going o­n around him-that's what System of a Down mean to me. Each person is a victim of the system but is also a system themselves. Every person can be more aware, and with more people bein aware, the culture changes, the politics will change, and the whole climate will change.

"Like Lennon's song 'Imagine,'-the things that he says in the song are so possible," he continues. "It's not a song that pisses you off, it doesn't cater to the right wind or left wing. You just can't argue with it, and that's why the song carries so much wight. I can't say that's how we are-shit, we piss off a lot of people off! But if you're making a point that both sides agree with, I think you're more dangerous."

Be careful," John Dolmayan cautions , as o­ne of his dining companions prepares to chow down o­n a large sandwich. "Don't bite into the toothpick!"
For someone who says he gre up worshipping Keith Moon, System's drummer is remarkably courteous, well-mannered, and concerned about the well-being of others. At o­ne point during today's lunch at a West Valley deli, he solicitously hands a stack of napkins around the table, just in case someone makes a mess.

"It's the small things that really matter," he says. "the energy we put out can be positive or negative, and we make those decisions a hundred time a day. Opening a door for an old man-that's a compassionate act, an maybe he will smile and take that feeling of compassion with him into the rest of the day. Until we care about people other than ourselves, until we realize that we do have a connection with them, becuase thy're human being we have no real hope of understanding each other."

Still, Dolmayan admits, compassion and understanding aren't always the first things out of everyone's mouth at a System rehearsal.
"Our personalities are so different, and we're not afraid to say anything," he says with a laugh. "Me and Daron are probably a little more vocal about things that Serj or Shavo, but we're both Cancers-we were born, like, three days apart-and we're both volatile and emotional. It's all positive stuff in the end, even if we don't exactly put things in a diplomatic way sometimes. It's all out of love, and it's all because we want to succeed. It's less about commercial success and more about artistic success."

Dolmayan says that, as early as the preproduction session for Hypnotize/Mezmerize, it became pretty clear that the record have to be a double album. "There was so much good material," he remembers. "We were all like, 'Man, what are we gonna do with this? How can we take this body of work and just cut it?' It's like cutting a quarter of your body off-you're never gonna be the same, and which quarter do yo pick?"

Though it took him three times longer to record his drum tracks for Hypnotize/Mezmerize than it did for Toxicity, Dolmayan says his parts have been finished since July of last year. "I've been doing a lot of twiddling my thumbs," he says, laughing. "But while Daron and Serj have been at work in the studio, Shavo and I have had a lot of time to practice together and really fine-tune our parts. I really think we're the tightest now that we've ever been."

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Unlike his visually striking band-mates, Dolmayan isn't someone that most music fans would recognize o­n the street, but he says he's happy with his anonymity. "I'm not a songwriter, and I'm not a soloist, but I'm the meat and potatoes of the band. I don't care about being noticed, I don't care about fame, I don't care about all this shit. I care about playing drums. And that's why System are a perfect fit for me."

Shavo Odadjian, System of a Down's bass player, could almost be Dolmayan's polar opposite. While the drummer carries himslef with a sober, almost formal bearing, Odadjian exudes the happy-go-lucky charm of a frisky puppy dog, alternately marveling at a reveling in the pers of his fame.
"I'm a food connoisseur," he says, as he digs into a dolop of fresh sea urchin at a tiny Ventura Boulevard sushi bar. "Steak? Fuck yeah-every day, I'll have it. I'll have it for dinner and lunch!"

But behind the braided beard and goofy grin, Odadjian has battled more than his share of depression, anxiety, self-doubt. "I'm finally just enjoying everything, instead of always being fucking pissed off or sad or worried, you know? Don't make me look like that guy from the Cure," he jokes, "but I was always worried about eerything. But these were deep things man. No o­ne could see it."

One of the keys to is emotional turnaround, he says, has been the rekindling of his love for the bass. A guitarist since his early teens, Odadjian didn't actually pick up th bass until he turned 20. In recent years, he says, he'd begun to regard the bass as merely the tool of his trade, instead of a potential instrument of self-expression. Feeling that Odadjian was letting down his end of their musical partnership, his bandmates confronted him during theHypnotize/Mezmerize sessions.
"They were like, 'Dude, you're a bass player who plays better guitar than bass. What the hell is wrong with you?' " Odadjian laughs at the memory. "Daron would say to me, 'Practice your bass! Practice your bass every day!' But I was looking at practice like work, like schoolwork. I would come home every day after practicing with the band and play guitar for hours. I was 'good enough' o­n bass, so why should I have to practice it at home? But then I realized, I strive to be the best at everything else I do-why haven't I applied that to this thing, which is supposed to be my life? So I'v ebrought the bass up to par agian. It took me awhile, but I found it."