It goes gold before the band is even thinking about a follow-up. The closest thing to a single is a deranged cut of fuzz called “Sugar,” where Tankian howls about something called “the Kombucha mushroom people” before building to the kind of dizzying pitch that confuses household animals.
Their first record is produced by the already legendary Rick Rubin - a big score for an unsigned band with a fervent local following. (And, lest we forget, they really rock.)īecause of the increasingly permissive state of rock radio in the ’90s, this formula is somehow not a turnoff to mainstream tastes, but acceptable. Their songs tackle war, genocide, American empire, organized religion, media bias, government control - the type of stuff you expect to hear from a leftist professor, not a rock band. And contrary to the hormone-crazed butt-rock boasts of the nu-metal bands suddenly dotting the culture, or the weepy, woe-is-me chugging of the post-grunge bands still trying to cash in after the end of Nirvana, these guys are deep. Serj Tankian, the singer, looks like a madman, only his hard-rock scream frequently eases up to reveal a soulful baritone - right before the music breaks back into anarchic free-for-all. Consider this: It’s the mid-1990s and four Armenian Americans from Los Angeles start a band, playing a fermented style of heavy metal that draws deeply from the traditional music of their homeland. We were just being ourselves,” System of a Down guitarist Daron Malakian tells me by way of explaining how weird his band was. System of a Down during the “Chop Suey!” video shoot at the Hollywood Area Hotel.
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