Chalk it up, like the band’s decision to release this two-disc project in separate halves, as a bow to the supposedly shortened attention spans of their fan base - an unnecessary move, since System are among the few modern hard-rock bands worth our undivided attention. Here, it weaves a bouzouki-like melody line through a tale of doomed recruits “standing on the top of their own graves / Wondering when Jesus comes / Are they gonna be saved?”Īlso Read Global Music Release Day Switches to Fridays on July 10īoth songs end too soon, and that’s a compliment. Ditto Hypnotize‘s powerful finale, “Soldier Side,” which was teasingly introduced at the beginning of Mezmerize.
SYSTEM OF A DOWN HYPNOTIZE FULL
“U-Fig,” which is full of haunting guitar lines and a hallucinatory rant about beating (or alternately, eating) flag-wavers, really deserves a “Stairway to Heaven”-scale build. By the disc’s second half, the high-speed diversity blurs into undifferentiated hopscotch. That strategy certainly keeps the songs moving, but the ideas rarely gel or stretch out. This second volume mirrors the first in content as in title: Its dozen tracks, all around four minutes long, ricochet through a clutch of ideas, compressing what might otherwise be prog-rock suites into jump-cut barrages. Per usual, it’s also about brutal riffage that turns on a dime, spiked with Eastern European flava, stoner wordplay, and pseudo-operatic bellowing that might have given Freddie Mercury wood. As a piece, Mezmerize/Hypnotize is about propaganda, psychic overload, unaccountable governments, God going AWOL, drugs, television, Tiananmen Square, falling bombs, prostitution, Hollywood, and the business of rock’n’roll - scary subjects all. And it proves again that System’s strength, and their weakness, lies in their 100-mph mood swings. Hypnotize is part two of the split opus they began earlier this year with Mezmerize, joining Conor Oberst and Kate Bush in the revival of that ’70s art-rock archetype, the double LP. Suffice to say, this is a profoundly bipolar band.
“Chop Suey!” - their best-known single (from 2001’s Toxicity) - is in the running for the most uplifting song about suicidal tendencies that wasn’t recorded by Suicidal Tendencies. System like to channel-surf between screaming death-metal freak-outs and dilated art-mosh celebration, with bits of Armenian folk music and cartoonish vocals thrown in for good measure. The work of pure genius.System of a Down toured arenas this year with Bad Acid Trip, a spaz-metal band whose moniker fits System pretty well - although Half-Bad Acid Trip would be more fitting. Do yourself a favour and listen to this album with fresh ears in 2020, the evidence is staggering, Toxicity has refused to age, unlike so many of their nu-metal peers, and still sounds as weird, as wild and as inhumanly massive as it did 19 years ago. Now that songs like the title track, Prison Song, Ariels and the career dominating Chop Suey! are so deeply woven into the fabric of metal it would be easy to forget just how bizarre and challenging those compositions are, but the fact they turned them into genuine generational anthems is a trick that maybe no other band can claim to have done. Debuting at number one on the US Billboard 200, it turned System from hot new cult band to one of the biggest names in the world of music, that it managed this feat without sacrificing one iota of the bands quirks and oddness is a stunning achievement. What else was it ever going to be? Toxicity remains one of the most essential releases made by any band in the history of metal.
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