|
 True
to Form
By
John Brodeur
System
of a Down
Mezmerize
(American/Columbia)
After
the fourth or fifth time listening through Mezmerize,
System of a Down’s remarkable fourth album (third proper),
it occurred to me that the band was, to some extent, playing
it safe. Maybe the songs had finally settled in after so many
spins, but it’s not like they’d lost any of their impact;
it’s just that the band hasn’t really broken form in any way.
The album supposedly represents the band at its most assured
and strange; plus it’s the first half of what would have been
(and will become, with the release of Hypnotize this
fall) a double album. But the band got plenty weird on their
last two releases (Toxicity and Steal This Album!),
which were more or less counterparts, despite the band’s protestations
to them being characterized as such.
So what’s to recommend Mezmerize over any of the other
System of a Down releases? For starters, the audacious first
single and (following a short intro) album opener, “B.Y.O.B.”
The time-changingest hit song in recent memory is also one
of the most perfect hard-rock tunes ever distilled into four-and-a-
quarter minutes. It’s a blastbeat-driven siren call, a desert
death march and a really fucked-up funk tune all at once.
And the album doesn’t sag a bit. Mezmerize bangs through
11 tracks in 36 minutes, leaving no room for thumb-twiddling.
Throughout, you can hear the band renewing, refining and updating
their trademark schizo sound. “Revenga” is a more sinister
“Chop Suey!” with its rapid-fire vocal breaks, syncopated
choruses and the requisite breakdown and rebuild to set up
the final stretch. On “Radio/Video,” the band moves from a
scream to a whisper and back, then expertly decrescendos into
a reggae break. “Question” interpolates a 5/4 stomp with a
flamenco-style acoustic guitar passage, then drops one of
the album’s many majestic choruses. The jerkiness is perfectly
natural for them; the frequent time- and style-changes seem
to come from a disinterest in letting listeners get too comfortable.
And there’s a message, too, or so they say. The group’s politics
have been front-and-center in the past (lead man Serj Tankian
is one of the co-founders of Axis of Justice, a nonprofit
social-issues collective), but on Mezmerize, they’ve
role-played them into songs like the stop-and-start “Cigaro,”
on which the gauntlet (“My cock is much bigger than yours”)
is thrown down over over a taut, Slayeresque riff. An anti-
television message (sort of) in “Violent Pornography” hides
behind a playfully repetitious verse that employs the age-old
rhyme of “fuck” and “suck.” Only “B.Y.O.B.” makes its issue
clear (“Why don’t presidents fight the war / why do they always
send the poor?”).
But the lyrics aren’t the point here, even if the group would
like for them to be. Hell, “Old School Hollywood” is about
bumping into aging celebrities at a Dodgers game, so, you
know, politics shmolitics. What matters is execution, and
these gentlemen have become masters of their craft. Here,
they’ve gotten the seemingly minor production touches (the
buried piano in the final verse of “This Cocaine Makes Me
Feel Like I’m On This Song,” for instance) down to a vital
science, thanks in large part to producer/dark overlord Rick
Rubin. And when Damon Malakian’s shrill voice meshes with
Tankian’s charismatic howl, the band imitating the sound of
a 15-ambulance pileup, System is on par with Angel Dust-era
Faith No More as the most inventive hard-rock group of their
day.
But don’t call Mezmerize different, because it’s not—at
least not for System of a Down. It’s just a darn good record
from a darn good band.
Meredith
Bragg & the Terminals
Vol.
1 (Kora Records)
Meredith Bragg & the Terminals play pop music that has
a folkish bearing, but is decidedly not folk music. There’s
a subtle intricacy and orchestral sensibility that is at the
core of Bragg’s 11 songs. Acoustic-based, the music has a
quiet insistency, made all the more compelling by the luscious
timbres of the instruments employed: acoustic guitar, cello,
keyboards and gentle percussives. Clocking in at 37 minutes,
a time which is short by CD-saturation standards, but which
is just right for the emotionally direct circumstances put
forth in the songs. The centerpiece is the set’s longest number,
the seven-and-a-half minute “I Won’t Let You Down.” Moving
at a stately pace, it picks up momentum without picking up
speed, as the urgency of the lyric’s promise is matched by
the swirling arrangement of the quartet. In particular, the
cello offers a potent and mournful counterpoint voice to Bragg’s
unaffected everyman vocals.
The beautiful letterpress package mirrors the pre-technological
era resonance of the music within. Recording, manufacturing
and playing the compact disc would not be possible without
electricity, but this is the sound of a living room sparkling
with a chamber ensemble warmed by the embers of a winter stove.
Bragg and his cohorts sound contemporary, at the same time
eschewing the trappings of modernist dictates, going for the
timelessness of human scale, rhythms and emotions.
—David
Greenberger
Three
Black Hats
Three
Black Hats (Self-Released)
Tom Howard, best known for his spastic tenure in Trauma School
Dropouts and Nogoodnix, re-emerges here with this intriguing
self-titled affair. Ever eccentric, one thick eyebrow raised,
Howard’s voice is that of a Danzig without the white-nippled,
performance-enhanced bravado. I hate to compare his voice
to the man, but that early Static Age croon is certainly
in the same ballpark. Recorded practically live (presumably)
at Scarlet East, this is a fine debut with some excellent
songwriting. The guitars seem intentionally understated, allowing
the malt to drip from Howard’s voice, a vagabond’s brave closing-time
hymn rising above a concrete backbeat.
High-water marks on my crab-encrusted sea wall go to “The
Zube,” “My Ill” and the dastardly rendered “Head in the Oven.”
Then there’s a curious flip side to the gnarled lip, the punk-ass
ashcan vis a vis “Dance,” “Tribal” and “No Win Situation,”
each reminiscent of pre-synth ’80s rock from the UK, bringing
to mind a gutter-stained Modern English or Bow Wow Wow (without
a naked, underage Rangoon-born girl) on some sort of quite
fine ride. I keep waiting for a punchline but TBH plays it
fairly straight, sort of like Paul Young on Desperate Housewives
(OK, I watch it, shut up) only these guys are killers
of a different color. Or the abscess thereof.
—Bill
Ketzer
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