To a sheltered white Midwestern teen like myself, this band was intoxicating, adrenalizing, and deeply confusing. Tankian ranted about God and the devil, about sex and war, about genocide and Russian roulette, sounding sometimes like a maniacal circus ringleader and sometimes like a monster having a meltdown. The band behind him often exploded into halting, chugging downtuned power chords but just as often pivoted to combustible jazz, madcap alt-metal that pulled as much from the Pixies as Faith No More, or the kind of Eastern European party rock I’d later associate with Gogol Bordello. On the LA quartet’s self-titled debut, singer Serj Tankian was Robin Williams as the genie gone darkly deranged - howling and wailing with an unnerving wide-eyed passion, bottoming out into hellish death metal bellow-roars, shouting like an angry dictator ordering his troops into battle. But even in this context, SOAD’s intense idiosyncrasies stood out. It was the high Ozzfest era, and weird was normal. As a young teenager, I’d been startled by Phil Anselmo’s shrill and burly blood-curdling scream at the outset of The Great Southern Trendkill, mystified by Jonathan Davis’ demonic scat on Life Is Peachy, frightened by Slipknot’s audiovisual onslaught, and barreled over by the sludgiest of the nü-metal B-listers. System Of A Down were just about the craziest shit I had ever heard.
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