It’s a shame that I didn’t discover this band until after their hiatus, but they’re still a defining band of my high school years and one of the most unique bands in metal. After some internal conflict drove the band apart from each other, it seems unlikely that System of a Down will ever make another album. Hypnotize isn’t this band’s bestselling record, and not necessarily even the best, but it’s their last release in nearly fifteen years and has some of my personal favorites. There’s a mood of grief, despair and frustration that carries across this album, dealing with everything from personal tragedies to war and human suffering, and this all comes together in what I consider System of a Down’s most sensitive and haunting record. The song “Lonely Day” was written by Malakian mourning over the death of his brother in a fire, while “Kill Rock n’ Roll” is a song he wrote after accidentally running over a rabbit with his car. Several of Malakian’s songs explore more personal issues, which is rare for the band. The band’s commitment to political and social causes is as strong as ever, but it’s given a new mood in their music that keeps the band sounding fresh. This tragic mood differs from the direct activist approach of songs like “Boom!” from Steal This Album in 2003. However, keeping with the album’s overall mood, political songs like “Soldier Side,” written at the height of the Iraq occupation, touch upon the issue with a sense of grief and despair ( “They were crying when their sons left, God is wearing black / He’s gone so far to find no hope, he’s never coming back”). Lyrically, this album deals with familiar topics like war and consumerism, also heard on the companion album Mezmerize the same year. Most of the songs are very lyrical without much emphasis on riffs or guitar solos, but the guitar tracks and drum beats nonetheless carry the rapid mood swings and transitions, heard in songs like “Holy Mountains” and “U-Fig.” The shared vocals are a highlight of this album, and they create many different moods across the album, with goofy songs like “Vicinity of Obscenity” and gloomier songs like “Hypnotize” and “Soldier Side.” The instrumentals on this album are similarly moody. Take the song “Dreaming” as an example: the verses have two vocal tracks from Tankian, one with the lead vocals and the other drowning him out with a kind of manic rambling that’s hard to make out, while the choruses are a harmony between the two and the softer bridge is mostly Malakian. At times their singing alternates, other times their vocals harmonize or even interfere with one another. The songs alternate between soft and heavy sections, and almost a 50/50 split in vocals between singer Serj Tankian and guitarist Daron Malakian. This album has a dark, somber atmosphere compared to System of a Down’s previous work. Hypnotize is a bit more polarizing among fans, but it contains some of their most experimental and interesting work, and it’s certainly not an album to be missed. In the end I decided on Hypnotize, the band’s last album at the peak of their career, which took a darker and more progressive approach to their wacky and politically-charged music. Toxicity (2001) is their most famous album and many people already know songs like “Chop Suey,” and I also thought of writing about their self-titled System of a Down (1999), by far their heaviest work. System of a Down has been a favorite band of mine for a long time, and it was difficult to choose which album to highlight for this blog. Here’s another odd choice among my album selections. Genre: Alternative metal, progressive metal
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