We had to suffer a pandemic and the Nagorno – Karabakh war in order for System of a Down to pull it together and release their first new songs in the last 15 years, back in early November, when Greece’s second (?) lockdown was about to start.
Just by analyzing the members’ recent interviews however, it is apparent that… ‘what we’ve got here is failure to communicate’, and that failure is responsible for the group’s inactiveness. Malakian wrote ‘Protect the Land’ and ‘Genocidal Humanoidz’ for Scars on Broadway, yet they ended up being released as SOAD songs for increased visibility, while the compositions for this one, ‘Elasticity’, were written by Tankian ‘in a rock style, for System’, but here they are, coming out as a solo EP. Bandmates that can’t stand behind each other’s material, do not share the same vision and disagree on politics because Tankian voted for Biden while Dolmayan made no excuses for supporting Trump : Go figure.
As far as the EP is concerned: Can ‘Elasticity’ function as a substitute of sorts, for what once was and is now lost? If the bar is set pretty low, if it’s enough to be reminded of Tankian’s gift for writing catchy tunes about heavy subject matter, then yes. The songs however not only wouldn’t make it a ‘Toxicity’ outtakes box-set, they wouldn’t be considered for ‘Elect the Dead’ either – which is, un-coincidentally, true for the aforementioned ‘philanthropic’ tracks that came out under the SOAD moniker.
