Daron Malakian and Scars on Broadway - Dictator

I suppose it’s kind of fitting that Daron Malakian has changed the name of his long-held-up side project to more accurately represent the focus on his vision being enacted on this project given that none of the members that performed on the band’s eponymous debut are part of Malakian’s current touring ensemble and that Malakian apparently performed all the instrumental parts of this album during its extremely short recording period in 2012.

It was reported that this album contained material that was originally intended for a potential, long-awaited System of a Down album that seems less likely to happen soon if at all given the surfacing of yet another roadblock in the band’s creative process. Nevertheless, the material made its way here and of course provided some consolation-level hype for this album.

I have always found Daron’s vocals to be a highlight of System of a Down’s music, and I always liked how much vocal interplay he and Serj Tankian integrated into their band’s music even though Serj was definitely the more primary lead singer. They brought the best out of each other on songs like “Needles”, “B.Y.O.B”, “Radio/Video”, and (my personal favorite) “Dreaming”. But even on songs where Daron took the lead instead, like “Lonely Day” and “Lost in Hollywood”, he sounded confident and made a consistently great case for his time at the front (as I often see so many fans of the band frequently lambasting his vocal contributions). The idea of Scars on Broadway in 2008 sounded pretty cool to me: a chance for Daron to be the vocal focus and main personality of an album.Yet, I was left disappointed with how little of his eccentricity and charisma he brought to the microphone and the music in general. Everything sounded so nervous and without confidence it felt like exactly the kind of thing his detractors would point to during complaints about his vocals on System of a Down’s material.

Given how I felt about the debut album, I wasn’t sure what to expect from Dictator, but I only really had one thing I was hoping for for it: just a more animated and confident performance than what had come a decade earlier. I’ve had a pretty good year; I’ve heard a lot of good music and I’ve made good strides towards achieving my hopes and dreams. Sadly, my hopes for this album were not meant to come true.

Dictator resides in the same swamp of unthrilling alternative metal its 10-year-old predecessor did. Like he did on the debut album, Daron takes on the role of the business-as-usual alt metal frontman, singing with little character within a much more restricted range than what he shines in.

On the lead single and introductory track, “Lives”, Daron sounds like he’s just hitting necessary notes in a narrow, lifeless melody. The song “Angry Guru” has a fast palm muted groove and a comedic verse that give the song potential to achieve the kind of wildness of something maybe off Mesmerize, but its bland chorus squanders the chance to make an explosive impact. The title track’s bridge finds Daron actually bringing the song to an intense climax with his shouted vocals, but a lazily swaying chorus again hinders the song before and after. The song “Fuck and Kill” has a slight tinge of Tool lased within it and it makes an interesting use of some woodwinds throughout as well. And for another brief moment at the end, Daron sounds energetic and frenetic in a momentarily exciting way, only to be cut off too soon by the dragging intro of the “ATWA”-esque “Guns Are Loaded”.

The song “Never Forget” sounds like a piece of dry 2000′s alternative rock/metal transplanted from its decade into this one, and “Talkin’ Shit” seems like it was such an unplanned pregnancy of a song for this album, definitely not nurtured well before its birth onto the record; it meanders through recycled guitar lines and overused chord progressions, and its given last-minute treatment with a few weird moments in its solos. “Till the End” hits kind of a high point with the dejected emotion it actually conveys pretty well with the melancholic vocal melody and the guitar harmonies. It pulls off the kind of emo/post-grunge-tinged alt metal vibe pretty well, and the guitar and general mood reminds me a lot of Metallica’s “Until It Sleeps” for some reason.

“We Won’t Obey” sounds like it was meant for System of a Down, but its cheesy lyrics and draft-level composition would probably never have made it to the final cut of a System album in the form it’s in here, if it made it through the cutting room at all. The punk-ish “Sickening Wars” brings a tiny bit more energy from Daron, but it leans on a recycled palm-muted groove almost the whole time and it doesn’t do enough for what it seems intended to do for the album.

The last two songs are a soothing cover of an instrumental by a Greek pop singer named Stamatis Kokotas and a clinical but lifeless cover of of Skinny Puppy’s “Assimilate”, which don’t really add or take away from the album’s experience.

Dictator is both the repeat of Scars on Broadway’s weak and unambitious delivery and a waste of embryonic musical ideas that could have been better fleshed out with the rest of Daron’s bandmates in System of a Down that were instead prematurely C-sectioned out into this project and left alone to fail. (Idk why I’ve used two birthing analogies in this piece already.) All the things I was hoping this project wouldn’t be, it is.