Hi!
Today in
You're Listening to us! we're going to talk about the best alternative rock group:
System of a Down (known too as
S.O.A.D.) a group that has created a personal kind of music. Some people think that this group was influenced by heavy metal, jazz fusion, folk, hard rock, psicodelic rock, funk, classic rock, blues and industrial bands.
The members of S.O.A.D. as you know are four. We´re gonna start talking about Serj Tankian, the vocalist. He's a tenor singer, composer, poet, politic activist and multi-instrumentalist and his special voice has turned
System of a Down into a very special group characterised by the chances on the rythms in their songs. Here we thave an example of his voice [song: jet pilot (0:17-0:52)]
Great, don´t you think so?
Now is the turn of Daron Malankian and Shavo Odadjian, the guitarist and bassist respectively, they´ve contributed in giving a very special and dynamic sound to
S.O.A.D. Here you have an example of their work with their instruments: [song: sugar(1:10-1:41)].
And finally we're going to appoint to the drummer: John Dolmayan, whose style when playing the drums has influenced a lot of drummers.
They rewained politically active, for example, they are against the war in Irak; they think that war would be over if politicians would really have wanted it. One example of their pacifist movement is
Boom! videoclip, a video filmed by Michael Moore. In that video they travel all around the world, visiting a lot of different cities such as Tokyo, Los Angeles, Berlin or Madrid, among others.
Of all their albums
Toxicity is the best one and their second album, where they critize issues such as some of the disorders that can make Internet, how empty is being famous if you haven't got anything else lo vacia que esta la fama sino se tiene nada mas, and talk about the consumer society we live in. [song: T
oxicity (0:38-1:40)]
Their third album, containing songs from the
Toxicity recording session, was released as
Steal This Album! because early recordings of most of the songs had leaked out onto the Internet beforehand. There are four different designs of the album available. One version of the CD resembles a Recordable CD labeled with a felt-tip marker, and the other four feature designs by individual band members.
In 2004, the band recorded two brand new albums for release in 2005 that would
be released 6 months apart from each other. They are
Mesmerize and
Hypnotize.
Mesmerize was released in April while
Hypnotize will be released approximately six months later. In early January, 2005, a new track called
Cigaro was leaked onto the Internet (some say it was leaked by the band itself, considering it was leaked onto a web page which featured a 'mesmerizing' spiral and was performed by the band at their Big Day Out appearances several days after the leak) to praise from their fans.
Finally we´re going to talk about the name of the group: it was inspired in a
poem by the guitarist called
Victims of a Down.In a show, the famous producer Rick Rubin, an old manager of groups as Slayer and Red Hot Chilli Peppers, saw them. That year, radios featured
Sugar and the spooky tension of
Spiders, each a fierce baptism for listeners weaned on predictability and rote rhyme schemes.
In 1997 band was given their logo by a record company and in 1998 they recorded their first album,
System of a Down, and their first single:
Sugar. In May, 2006 the band told that they would have a non-definitive rest se tomarian un descanso pero que no era definitivo- the band split up XXXXXXXXX. Daron Malakian and John Dolmayan formed
Scars on Brodway, releasing their debut under that same name in 2008 and Serj Tankian launched a single called
Elect the Dead where he says that he hates war and he thinks that it's not fair that innocent people have to pay for a war of politicians. Here we can listen to the lyrics of that album [song:
Empty walls (0:20-1:27)]
Good bye, people... We´ll be here again tomorrow at the same hour!
