They're certainly loud. And they're certainly angry at things, respectable left wing things like advertising, commercialisation, globalisation, you know the like. If they weren't loud and played acoustic guitars and wore shirts, they'd be a bunch of wankers really - 'I need to seek my inner vision' - I mean come on.

Musically they sound an awful lot like Frank Zappa meets Fear Factory - lots of abrubt changes in dynamics and sporadic offerings of wisdom about weird stuff. But it's nothing particularly new. It's refreshing, and you can bang your head to it unlike sk8er punk rock, but it's been said and done before.

Did you ever wonder where head banging (pre-cursor to moshing) started? It started at Rage Against the Machine concerts. See, what would happen is Zack would go off on some tangent about how the people in Mexico were struggling and everyone in the audience would just sort of smile and nod politely. Except he kept going off on more and more tangents and people had to do more and more smiling and more and more nodding. Eventually everyone realised that it would be easier to just keep nodding all the time rather than stopping and starting every five seconds.

So imagine Rage Against the Machine times three. That's System of a Down. Three times heavier, three times more political. Check out this lyrical ditty from 'Boom!'

Modern globalization,
Coupled with condemnations,
Unnecessary death,
Matador corporations,
Puppeting your frustrations,
With the blinded flag,
Manufacturing consent
Is the name of the game,
The bottom line is money,
Nobody gives a fuck.
4000 hungry children die per hour,
from starvation,
while billions spent on bombs,
create death showers.

Yawn

Obviously it's a noble cause, but for fuck's sake, this is nothing but the soundtrack to a world trade organisation protest: a bunch of violent whinging hippies who've suddenly found themselves on the world stage for no good reason other than the fact that they are violent hippies. It's global oxymoronicism. I'm going to start a protest group against it. Meet me under the red flag at midnight.