Article written by: Ben Thompson.
The Sunday Telegraph -London. Imagine Jimi Hendrix has been magically brought back to life and you are taking him on a voyage of discovery to find out how far rock 'n' roll has come (or, more accurately, not come) in the 35 years since his tragically early demise.
There is probably only one band in the world at the moment with the power to make the great man scratch his head in appreciative bewilderment and wonder "How on earth did that
happen?" That band is System of a Down. On Sunday, at the third of three sold-out shows at the Brixton Academy, this maverick Armenian-American heavy-rock quartet scales improbable heights of frenetic precision. Playing in front of fairground distorting mirrors which intensify the already hallucinogenic vigour of their performance, they take a series of disparate musical ingredients - Armenian folk styles, elements of electro-pop, funk and rap (with the occasional Dire Straits or Wham
cover thrown in, just to keep the crowd on their toes) - and mix them together in a very large and very metallic cauldron. The sound that results is utterly, savagely distinctive. Shaven-headed drummer John Dolmoyan blurs the line between human beat-keeper and well-oiled piece of industrial machinery. His partner in rhythm, the excellently named Shavo Odadjian, plays bass-lines as fluid and sinuous as the plaited beard which stretches down from his chin to his midriff. But it's the very human entanglement of two contrasting front-people which - as with Lennon and McCartney, Page and Plant or Peters & Lee - makes System of a Down truly special. Singer Serj Tankian cultivates the demeanour of an Old Testament prophet and looks like Antony Sher playing the lead in a Frank Zappa biopic. With his thinning hair, slightly bulging eyes and undying admiration for the early works of Iron Maiden, guitarist Daron Malakian initially seems a rather less imposing character, but he is hugely talented. Not only can he play the guitar like five or six different people at once, he also writes songs that have tunes. And good ones, too; the kind that 4,000 people are happy to sing along with, even though Mezmerize, the album they're taken from, has only been out for a couple of weeks. Lyrics such as "What is in us that turns a deaf ear to the cries of human suffering?" or "Eloquence belongs to the conqueror" may not be conventional karaoke material, but that doesn't seem to bother anyone in this crowd. And by the time this performance reaches a thunderous climax with "Toxicity", the band's signature 2001 eco-anthem (sample
lyric: "Eating seeds is a pastime/activity"), System of a Down's battle cry - "Somewhere between sacred silence and sleep, Disorder! Disorder! Disorder!" - makes an irresistible kind of sense. THOUGH HIS records have yet to sell in quite the seven-figure quantities that System of a Down's do, any list of America's five greatest living songwriters which didn't include Smog's Bill Callahan would be based on a fundamental misconception. This master of the lugubrious aperu takes to the Islington Academy stage on Thursday night with the brittle assurance of a first-year student in an Ivy League tutorial. As opening figures of speech go, Callahan's "With
the grace of a corpse in a rip-tide..." certainly puts down a marker.
And before the main body of his set concludes with a much loved earlier song about "letting himself be held like a big old baby", he and his band have ambled the gamut from death to life, from the rush of a tidal race to the stillness of sleeping horses. |
