In the world of album releases,
Elect The Dead was a slight disappointment, anyone could admit that. Serj Tankian’s voice and lyrics were there, but the instrumentation and song writing absolutely were not, and for some fans
Elect The Dead quite a tedious and boring album to listen to. Despite that, the album was a success, selling over 300,000 copies, making Serj a star. Because he is a now star, the time is starting to come for worthless merchandise of self-advertisement to start popping to bring cough up more dough for the wallets of the label and Serj.
Lie Lie Live EP is one of the first cases of worthless merchandise to pop up, containing two boring live performances and three god awful remixes, and none of which seem to work or fit together to make a cohesive unit.
Serj isn’t exactly the best live vocalist, but he does get the job done. System of A Down songs involved the band to put up a frantic and crazy performance, and Serj’s would follow along with that, making for an entertaining live performance. The songs from Serj’s solo album are bland, generic, and boring, and thus Serj’s live vocals tend to just drag along with the instrumentation. He doesn’t really do much to save the performances from being tiring, with the exception of the last chorus of "Lie Lie Lie" where his vocals sound energetic and powerful, just like they should be. The music on the live performance "The Unthinking Majority" also seems to lack some of the epic nature that they had in the album, and seem to just plod along drearily. If Serj and his band had taken a caffeine pill, the songs would have been much more entertaining.
Where this EP completely dies in quality are the three remixes: "Empty Walls (Victorious Club Remix)", "Sky Is Over (Fawks Yeah Remix)", and "Empty Walls (Dub Remix)". Both Empty Walls remixes are some of the worst songs that I have ever heard remixed. "Empty Walls (Victorious Club Remix)" tries to sound interesting by adding different sections and parts, but overall sounds like an empty industrial mess that is trying to sound progressive, whereas "Empty Walls (Dub Remix)" attempts to sound atmospheric and soothing, but goes absolutely nowhere. "Sky Is Over (Fawks Yeah Remix)" isn’t nearly as bad as the other two remixes, but still tries to blend too many genres with the original song and sounds completely forced and out of place.
An utter fiasco would be the perfect word for
Lie Lie Live EP. The songs don’t flow together at all, and sounds completely forced and pushed upon. Serj Tankian has the chance to make really good music, but stuff like this just isn’t doing the job for him. The thing Serj needs to do is to get with some excellent musicians, and try to write music with them, instead of taking of the songwriting as whole. Serj is a good artist, but with the turn of recent events, we realize that he cannot make brilliant music all alone.
