The System Has Failed: If Mezmerize Didn’t Convince You, Hypnotize Will
Written: Nov 22 '05 (Updated Nov 22 '05)
Product Rating:
Pros: The best tracks effectively combine SOAD’s wild vocals and potent riffing.
Cons: Very few strong tracks, tons of ridiculous filler, frequently boring.
The Bottom Line: I think it’s safe to say that SOAD’s double-album concept has floundered completely. Even hardcore fans will be left scratching their heads.
deepthroat101's Full Review: Hypnotize [PA] [Digipak] by System of a Down
Even System of a Down’s strongest supporters had to have been slightly disappointed with the first-half of the band’s new albums, Mezmerize and Hypnotize. While Mezmerize had a couple successes to its credit, it was generally weighed down by pointless filler songs (Violent Pornography, Radio/Video, Cigaro, etc.) Not surprisingly, the follow-up album, Hypnotize suffers the same fate. I was optimistic that SOAD was saving the best material for the second half of the double-dip CDs. Sadly, Hypnotize can’t even match the low expectations set by its predecessor. The simple conclusion is that the System has definitely failed, not once, but now with Hypnotize, twice, in a six-month span. Ouch.
The album’s best song comes crashing onto the scene like a kamikaze pilot. To put it bluntly, Attack is beautiful mayhem. The moody verses are offset by the furious riffing and fanatical screaming of the chorus. All other artists should take notice: this is how to kick-start an album. Kill Rock ‘N Roll has another ear-grabbing chorus and some fine vocal interplay between Daron Malakian and Serj Tankian. Hypnotize takes a while before it gets off the ground, but the slower buildup ends with an adequate payoff. Tankian’s potent yelling is exciting, “I’m just sitting in my car and/ Waiting for my girl” and John Dolmayan pummels his kit without reserve. As so many bands do nowadays, they tease you with a tremendous opening only to swiftly implode soon after.
The first ominous signs of problems begin to surface with the second track, Dreaming. It’s best summed up as an incoherent mishmash, with no conceivable direction or structure. If you took all the foods of your Thanksgiving diner; turkey, vegetables, potatoes, gravy, etc. and threw them in a blender, the end result would be enough to make your stomach lurch. That’s the same effect this track has. Other disasters include Stealing Society, which takes repetition to a whole other level. The dim-witted chorus of “Two suns fighting/ One’s abiding/ Two suns/ Watching them both fighting/ Two suns” is repeated enough times to make your ears pop. If only the torture could have ended there, but unfortunately, it’s only the beginning.
The album’s latter half consists of some of SOAD’s worst material to date. Starting with U-Fig, my ears started to cry out for relief. Tankian’s voice grates to no end, and the lyrics of beating down the U.S. government are both ineptly written and thematically mundane. Vicinity of Obscenity shows SOAD outdoing themselves with respect to sheer lyrical horridness. Lines like “Terracotta pie hey/ Terracotta pie/ Banana banana banana banana terracotta pie” are ludicrous, even for this group. As if things couldn’t get any worse, Malakian takes over songwriting and singing duties on the last few tracks. She’s Like Heroin features his voice, in all its nasally glory, yelping about hookers for three excruciating minutes. Soldier Side marks an improvement in the lyrics department, but the song meanders around, desperately searching for some vigor or buzz to generate interest, which the instrumentation is incapable of doing. Now SOAD’s failure is complete.
I never imagined System of a Down could make a worse album than Mezmerize, but they proved me wrong with the unsightly, haphazard train-wreck called Hypnotize. In the song Tentative, the band asks “where do you expect us to go when the bombs fall” but it might just as well have been the listener asking that question, as there is no shortage of bombs on this record. Ultimately, SOAD’s decision to release two separate albums in the same year has backfired entirely. As if being charged twice wasn’t bad enough, the good material is few and far between, and the filler is almost overwhelming. There are plenty of albums released this year that will hypnotize you, but this dreck isn’t one of them.
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