Toxicity | Loppylugs

Submitted by David Eastman on 21 June 2017 - 9:30pm

Cover:

Artist:

System of a Down

album-ID:

a_193

Nationality:

USA

Year:

2 001

Release-year:

0000

Num-of-tracks:

Track-listing:

Prison Song*Needles*Deer Dance*Jet Pilot*X*Chop Suey!*Bounce*Forest*Atwa (Air, Trees, Water, Animals) *Science*Shimmy*Toxicity*Psycho*Aerials*Arto

Length-in-mins:

Nominator:

Bean

meeting-ID:

m_74

Now-num:

2 017

Spotify-URL:

4DR0GWo7w2GJyQnFVa4jAB

Short-title:

toxicity

nominator-ID:

u_117

Meeting-date:

Thursday, 24 August 2017

MusicBrainz-URL:

f50fbcb4-bfcd-3784-b4c9-44f4793e66b2

Wikipedia-URL:

Toxicity_(album)

Spotify-link-type:

album

Metacritic-URL:

toxicity/system-of-a-down

Discogs-URL:

System-Of-A-Down-Toxicity/master/35626

Allmusic-URL:

mw0000620587

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review-form data

guest-list data

108

109

117

reviewers-IDs data

-14-

-1-

-13-

76

reviewed by

Richard Norbury
73

reviewed by

Glyn Lewis

Toxic Cistern

1-6-11-15

8-14

When first playing this I did have to pass through a phase of “What the blazes is this nonsense?” before coming out the other side and realising there is some inventive and clever stuff on here.

I thought the vocals were a strong feature of the album, switching styles between screaming, shouting, whispering, spoken, that unearthly growl thing these eccentric death metal chaps like to do and some really decent bits of actual singing, as well as some parts with a second vocalist. It's obviously overall a very aggressive feel but the dynamics they use help to bring that home.

I appreciated the song lengths – all little explorations of themes, enough to be interesting, but never too much. There’s a great choppy, crunchy guitar sound and, very occasionally, little overdriven patterns. The drummer is great – keeping it simple but driving it along.

Wikipedia listed a number of styles used on the album which included folk, jazz, progressive, Greek and Middle Eastern, this did kind of amuse me as, although there are low-key touches of perhaps one or two of those, this isn't really a sophisticated fusion of these kind of sounds - it's much closer to being an unrelenting nu-metal assault, but in a nice way.
38

reviewed by

Neil Hornsey

I find this hard blatant rock style difficult to deal with, especially the vocals which just growl unintelligably. The entire album lacks any kind of subtlety whatsoever, bang bang bang over the head with a sledgehammer. It's not without talent in the songwriting or musicianship, but not for me.