10/22/2023 0 Comments Chop suey song christmas spoofBut we were not going to write a song that sounded like Limp Bizkit so we could get on the radio. “Limp Bizkit was on the radio at the time - now, Limp Bizkit was actually very cool to us in the early days of System of a Down. “We weren’t playing the safe nu-metal riff that was going on at that time,” Malakian said. It goes gold before the band is even thinking about a follow-up. The closest thing to a single is a deranged cut of fuzz called “Sugar,” where Tankian howls about something called “the Kombucha mushroom people” before building to the kind of dizzying pitch that confuses household animals. Their first record is produced by the already legendary Rick Rubin - a big score for an unsigned band with a fervent local following. (And, lest we forget, they really rock.)īecause of the increasingly permissive state of rock radio in the ’90s, this formula is somehow not a turnoff to mainstream tastes, but acceptable. Their songs tackle war, genocide, American empire, organized religion, media bias, government control - the type of stuff you expect to hear from a leftist professor, not a rock band. And contrary to the hormone-crazed butt-rock boasts of the nu-metal bands suddenly dotting the culture, or the weepy, woe-is-me chugging of the post-grunge bands still trying to cash in after the end of Nirvana, these guys are deep. Serj Tankian, the singer, looks like a madman, only his hard-rock scream frequently eases up to reveal a soulful baritone - right before the music breaks back into anarchic free-for-all. ![]() Consider this: It’s the mid-1990s and four Armenian Americans from Los Angeles start a band, playing a fermented style of heavy metal that draws deeply from the traditional music of their homeland. We were just being ourselves,” System of a Down guitarist Daron Malakian tells me by way of explaining how weird his band was. to capture the drums, would have time to get the vocal takes and layers they wanted done.System of a Down during the “Chop Suey!” video shoot at the Hollywood Area Hotel. AFAIK Toxicity wasn't a totally ridiculous recording process like say Kid A, but they did track a million different layers of guitars with different tones, and spent money on a top notch engineer, room, the best mics, boards, etc. most albums will continue to sound like this, with gradual improvements, unless someone finds a way to have at least some of the bigger acts make enough money that they can actually spend more money and time on their recordings. same thing with replacing all the original drums with sampled sounds and quantizing them and makes it much cheaper and faster to get passable drum sounds, but it takes a lot of time to capture and mix them in a way that sounds human and again its hard to capture the unidealized sounds you could get by live micing. but they don't give you the ability to capture all of the fuckery you could do with mic placement, room size, unideal settings, etc. ![]() a lot of bands have moved over to recording guitars with digital modelers because they're really convincing at capturing the clean, close mic'd sound of classic amps. ![]() doing it it sounds so fucking lame and takes the life out of whatever they're doing." Seems like every band with this kind of sound is going in this "digitized" direction with their production/tones these days, which sounds cool when it's really leaned into (bmth, architects, periphery etc.), but when it's bands who have always been basically plug-in-and-play like ABR, ADTR etc.
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