June 03, 2005 - For their fourth album (a.k.a. the first half of their sprawling Mesmerize/Hypnotize double disc release) the four lads known as SOAD seem to have spent equal time hanging out at the opera, Groundlings showcases, and in a dank rumpus room listening to old thrash and hardcore on a broken Playschool mono turntable. This is to say that the bulk of Mesmerize presents an interesting combo of tongue-in-cheek aural pleasure and straight forward balls-to-the-wall power blitz that shows the band having fun with themselves (and at times at the expense of diehard fans). The result is a topsy-turvy affair that shoots in one ear and out the other in a rather painless fashion that will bristle the hairs on the back of your neck like a whirlwind, leaving behind debris and chaos that eventually will get swept away and disposed of properly.

Of course mixed in with all the spoofiness is plenty of serious, introspective analysis as has become the modus operandi of this outfit. For example, "Solider Side - Intro" is a rather bleak, almost forlorn number that features the rather bleak, almost forlorn lyrical refrain: "Welcome to the soldier side where there's no one here but me. People all grow up to die. There is no one here but me." It ends in a bomb scare siren that bleeds seamlessly into the album's first single "B.Y.O.B." that showcases Daron Malakian and Serj Tankian running through a cartoon-inspired rush of voices that meld screamo antics with rock opera librettos. And the chorus is straight smoothed out pop theatricality. Of course all of this light-heartedness hides the caustic lyrics that question "Why don't presidents fight the war? Why do they always send the poor?" It's easy to grasp that the guys are going for the subliminal insertion, masking their incendiary political rants with chart accessible arena metal-cum-Billboard pop. And you know what, it pretty much works.

The mock opera technique again rears its head on "Revenga" (hell, even the title boasts overly dramatic opera intonation), and "Cigaro," a phallic imagery drenched swerve driver. The former sounds as if it could have been lifted from some forgotten Broadway musical and then given the SOAD overhaul. The latter, well, let's just leave well enough alone, at least in terms of lyrical injection. Musically, however, it's very much in the vein of the stylistics employed on "B.Y.O.B." in that it sounds part cartoonish, part thrash, and just a mite bit indebted to the "Marriage Of Figaro" (at least in titular aspects, but also in terms of vocal delivery. Or perhaps they're borrowing more from the Freddie Mercury-if-he-had-been-a-metal head-school of musical inspiration).

"Radio/Video" contains a Wall of Voodoo/Stan styled vocal chorus and then slips into reggae-meets-klezmer styled antics during the verse. The chorus again demonstrates the band's cheekiness as they scream "Hey man, look at me rockin' out/I'm on the radio!" And this isn't even touching upon the whole Fiddler On The Roof break out toward the end of the track. The cheekiness continues, this time encoded in the brash, hilarious song title "This Cocaine Makes Me Feel Like I'm On This Song" and then into the crayzay blitzkrieg that is "Violent Pornography," which on the surface is a condemnation of the crap that infiltrates the television slipstream these days. It's perhaps the most musically straightforward of all the tracks on the album. But this doesn't mean that it's any less bizarro in nature. On the contrary. The chorus alone is bugged, not to mention the dualistic vocal workout and the piercing background glow.