Steal This Album

Releasing an album of out-takes, sorry, “previously unreleased material”, whilst the fans are waiting on the follow-up to your first multi-platinum selling release may appear like a cheap marketing ploy, but… er…

It must be said that I am a massive System fan. I have been since 1999, when I heard ‘War’ on some dodgy compilation, bought the album and subsequently fell in love with it.

In my book, 2001’s Toxicity – their multi-platinum breakthrough – was genius. However, Steal This Album costs exactly the same amount to buy as Toxicity does. I checked. So here’s the rub. SOAD indulge themselves with provocative album titles, and blather about advertising and fucking the system – which is all well and good. But if System really cared, surely they’d insist that what is no more than a holding album would retail for less than a full-price fully-fledged new release? For a band who claim to be so anti-consumerist, this feels a bit much like a rip off.

That said, Steal This Album is still a fine collection of music. With a tracklist boasting the brilliant ‘Chic N Stu’, a song about pizza, advertising and therapy, ‘Roulette’, an eight-year-old string laden acoustic ballad and the ear-beating ‘I-E-A-I-A-I-O’, the album is certainly worth having.

As to whether we can believe in System Of A Down, well, that’s another question entirely.