BIG TOP METAL.

The article focuses on a guitarist Daron Malakian. Daron, 29, is the guitarist in one of the most musically accomplished and politically conscious mainstream rock bands of the past decade: the Armenian-American parade-metal purveyors System of a Down. Angry sociopolitical metal gives way to frothy pop chants, which spontaneously burst into Armenian circus music and then fade into progressive rock or glam rock or grind-core or silence — all sung with trilling r s and a Frank Zappa-esque sense of intelligent whimsy.