Scars On Broadway
Scars On Broadway
Scars On Broadway
(Interscope)
He might not like it, but from here to forever, any music Daron Malakian creates outside of System Of A Down will be compared to that band. That band who, in less than a decade, scored five platinum records, three no. 1 records, and redefined the rules of heavy metal. So projects like Scars On Broadway will immediately draw the same question: “Is it as good as System Of A Down?”
Appearing: Saturday, November 1st at Metro in Chicago.
“Does it sound like System Of A Down?” on the other hand, is almost rhetorical. Malakian wrote a majority of System’s music, so it’s only natural Scars On Broadway will sound like his “main” (Malakian shows no interest in reforming System anytime soon) gig, especially given his partner on Scars is System drummer John Dolmayan. So it’s absolutely no surprise songs like “Stoner Hate,” “Serious,” and “Exploding/Reloading” sound like System without Serj. To be fair, though, Serj Tankian’s solo effort, Elect The Dead, more often than not sounded exactly like System without Daron.
It’s not a carbon copy, though. Without Tankian, Malakian’s music is a little less spastic. “Insane,” for instance, forgoes all the stops and starts and pogo bounce of System and basically sticks shockingly close to a uniform arrangement. “Whoring Streets” and “Funny” are the same story, often making Scars sound more like a hard rock band than alt-metal.
As a lyricist, Malakian is elegant (“If you were me could you defend/the given right to all of man”), provocative (“I watched the President kiss his family/For we live in sin for we will win/I watched the President fuck society”), and funny (“Let’s clap our hands/for the president and Jesus Christ/And did I mention Charlie Manson and everybody else who was nice”), but also maddeningly absurd. If “Cute Machines” (“Cute machines, that I love/Cute machines, just can’t get enough of/They go gogogogogo”) was a System song, it would work because Tankian’s knack for the nonsensical; it’s not what he says, but how he says it. Malakian didn’t want Tankian’s voice here, though. Just like Tankian didn’t want Malakian’s riffs on Elect The Dead ( though he wanted Dolmayan’s drumming). That’s as crazy as any Scars On Broadway song lyric.
— Trevor Fisher
