Alt-rock survivors System of a Down, Audioslave, and Foo Fighters rise to the challenge of a new decade BY MATT ASHARE

Modern rock, new metal, and active rock: all constructs of the ’90s, a turbulent decade for a music industry blindsided by Nirvana and demographic fragmentation on a level no one had ever imagined. Narrowcasting was the short-term solution: find the right niche, create a new format, and market the hell out of whoever fit the mold. Suddenly, songs were going in and out of heavy rotation with such frequency that bands who’d scored big radio hits couldn’t fill even modest venues. And adding financial injury to insult for misguided A&R talent scouts, by the time bidding wars over artists ended with huge advances paid out in unrecoupable millions, a new trend would be on the rise. The women-in-rock Lilith fairy years — all three of them — gave way to rage rock and the aggro mosh pits of Woodstock. Yet if sensitive was out and angry was back in, what was Elliott Smith doing sharing the Oscar spotlight with Whitney Houston? SoundScan, an electronic point-of-sale system that eliminated major-label syndicates’ control over the charts, had turned the industry on its head, opening a wound that wouldn’t heal, and no amount of consolidation among the big labels could stanch the bleeding.

So it’s no surprise that so few heavy hitters from the ’90s survived past Y2K. Yeah, drugs took their toll on Seattle grunge, but no decade has been immune from that vice. The lucky ones, it now seems, were well established before Nevermind — U2 and R.E.M., Bruce Springsteen and the Stones — or simply skirted the aggressive labeling and demographic-targeted marketing that took over the panicked industry. Dave Matthews, for all his associations with the jam scene, made it out alive by writing mainstream pop tunes with Glen Ballard, and he’s got a perfectly decent new DualDisc — Stand Up (RCA) — to prove it. But he was never truly on the alternative side of the tracks, and that’s where the real danger of being labeled, overmarketed, and disposed of lurked.

The few big survivors of the alt-’90s had to be steadfast in their vision and aggressive enough to promote an agenda/æsthetic that transcended marketing labels. Green Day made it; Blink-182 didn’t. Now, Dave Grohl’s Foo Fighters are back with the double album In Your Honor (Capitol), and former Soundgarden frontman Chris Cornell has wrestled an unlikely coupling with three Rage Against the Machine expats into a fruitful marriage on Out of Exile (Interscope), the second Audioslave album. Even more improbable and exciting is the emergence of System of a Down, a West Coast foursome who were mistaken for a new-metal band when they debuted in 1998: their new Mezmerize (American/Columbia) scanned close to a half a million copies its first week and landed at the top of the Billboard album chart.

If Slayer, Metallica, and the Chili Peppers are your touchstones, then System of a Down’s explosive, moshable, riff-heavy, rapped-sung, funk-and-thunk songs are metal. They were branded new-metal right out of the gate, linked to Korn and Limp Bizkit and thrown in with the likes of Incubus on tours. But if, like me, you grew up on the incendiary hardcore of Bad Brains and the political punk of the Dead Kennedys, then System of a Down sounded familiar in a totally different way. And perhaps that’s why they’ve come into such sharp focus as the Limp Bizkits and the Korns have faded from view.

Mezmerize opens with a clean guitar figure framing the elegiac harmonies of frontman Serj Tankian and guitarist Daron Malakian on "Soldier Side." But it’s just a ruse: feedback wells up from Malakian’s guitar, Tankian’s ire rises, and a thunderous backbeat kicks in as Tankian screams lines Jello Biafra might have written 25 years ago: ‘Why do they always send the poor. . . . You depend on our protection yet you feed us lies from the tablecloth." The song’s cynical contrast — wealthy people partying while someone else’s kid is sent off to war — is pure Dead Kennedys, as is the shouted mantra "Why don’t presidents fight the war?/Why do they always send the poor?" The jarring rhythmic shifts from staccato metal-funk guitar riffs to speedcore thrusts are a strategy the Bad Brains perfected on 1983’s Ric Ocasek–produced Rock for Light and 1986’s more funk-inflected I Against I (SST). "Radio/Video" even features a Bad Brains–style reggae breakdown.

There’s angst aplenty on Mezmerize. But it’s not the woe-is-me variety of the ’90s angry white male — it’s directed at fake wars, real deaths, lies, and, on "Old School Hollywood" and "Lost in Hollywood," the shallowness of System’s home town. Sure, Tankian’s targets are obvious ones, but he brings a potent mix of intensity, sarcasm, and intelligence to bear on them. Even in the absence of trad melodies, there isn’t a number here that doesn’t demand your attention. Instead, songs career from riff to riff and scream to scream as they coalesce into one big evolving hook.

With Rage Against the Machine gone, System of a Down are the last band left with the chops and political savvy to pull this kind of thing off. Which is fine. Nobody wants to hear Chris Cornell try to be someone he’s not. And Audioslave have come to terms with that on Out of Exile, which debuted at the top of the Billboard charts the week before Mezmerize arrived. It took Soundgarden the better part of a decade to figure out that less is more when you’ve got a powerhouse band backing a screamer. Audioslave are already there on this, their second album. With its simple, single-note guitar line, straightforward backbeat, driving melodic bass line, and anthemic chorus, the first single, "Be Yourself," owes more to R.E.M. and U2 than to classic cock rock. It’s a pop song. Tom Morello, the most inventive hard-rock guitarist since Eddie Van Halen, still gets his moments in the spotlight. But Morello and the rest of the band (bassist Tim Commerford and drummer Brad Wilk) stick to serving the songs. When Morello does cut loose with one of his trademark turntable-scratch guitar solos or modal runs, it matters. And if politics have fallen by the wayside for the ex-Rage guys, it’s because Cornell has other things — like escaping the Hollywood System of a Down skewer — on his mind.

Escape is also high on Dave Grohl’s list, at least for the first half of In Your Honor. He long ago threw off the mantle of Nirvana and the grunge baggage that went with it simply by writing album after album of really good pop songs. Lately, though, he’s been hanging with Queens of the Stone Age, delving into muscular stoner rock, and Josh Homme’s influence is apparent in the thickly layered wall-of-guitar production on disc one. He’s also, if his lyrics are any indication, suffered some romantic woes, and he’s pissed. Huge roaring guitars well up around a screaming Grohl on the title cut as he asks "Can you hear me/Hear me screaming?" and proclaims "What’s mine is yours and yours is mine/In your honor I would die tonight for you to feel the love." You get the sense nobody’s listening. "Is someone getting the best, the best, the best of you?" he asks jealously on "Best of You." And the pounding "The Last Song" finds him cutting his ties with the line "This is the last song I will dedicate to you."

Disc two is the "soft" one. Grohl has had luck in this area before — his slower, quieter version of "My Hero" on the Varsity Blues soundtrack was an inspired reinterpretation, not just an unplugged take. But here it feels as if disc two, with strummed and not totally bandless songs, had been written and recorded as an apology for all the bile spilled on disc one. It’s more like a bonus disc. Grohl does make some interesting inroads into folksy country, but he’s overreaching, or perhaps overcompensating. Either way, it doesn’t detract from the power and passion of disc one, or from the fact that, like Audioslave and System of a Down, Foo Fighters have come out of the treacherous ’90s alive and kicking.