If you were to give the rowdiest inmates in your typical insane asylum some distortion guitars and a couple books by Noam Chomsky, they would probably come up with music akin to the rabid rock that is System of a Down's trademark. Since 2001's Toxicity, the Armenian band has transcended its original fire-and-fury novelty reputation, inducing at its best the kind of down-with-society madman euphoria that heavy metal achieved before entering the unfortunate reign of Korn and Slipknot. After spending the past few years fuming over the activities of the Bush administration, SOAD streamlined its head-banging mania into a two-album megaproject, consisting of the summer release Mezmerize and its fall companion, Hypnotize.
I wonder, though, if it wasn't too much. Overdosing on absurdist anger -- delivered here in nutty-and-nuttier pieces like "Kill Rock'n'Roll" and "Vicinity of Obscenity" -- isn't all that easy. But no matter how many times you can listen to front man Serj Tankain implode, you can't deny Hypnotize, while revisiting the angst of earlier albums, does not embrace the unpolished, obsessive force that made System the band it is.
When they dispensed with things like harmony and lyrical logic, which ripple obscurely through Hypnotize until the cleaned-up last tracks "Lonely Day" and "Soldier Side," the group had a candid, endearing force. Part of this is dissipated by guitarist turned backup singer Darin Malakain, who spends several songs impersonating Green Day's Billie Joe Armstrong. You can't tell whether our Armenian friends are stretching the bounds of their aesthetic with songs like Hypnotize's title track, or just falling back on mainstream conventions.
Of course the politics are superfluous, especially when you consider what a rampantly cynical and otherwise unmatchable indictment of the Iraq war this year's earlier single "B.Y.O.B." proved. Still, more recent adrenaline-pumping fare like "Attack," along with the doomsday echo chamber opening of "Holy Mountains," proves more or less irresistible. Hypnotize, for all its polished let-down, is often enough true to System form: tantalizing us with some juicy pieces of aural knock-around and then, with a mixture of grinning lunacy and upright frustration, offering us another portion.
