Credit: Found On Internet

Before tonight’s gig, there is a queue that stretches right around The World’s End, the pub that tonight’s venue, The Underworld, lurks beneath like a…well, like a seedy underworld. It might only hold 200 or so people, but it seems that they all showed up well in advance.

Are they here because they’re desperately excited about Scars on Broadway’s forthcoming album? Are they here because the next London show the band have booked is at a venue ten times the size of tonight’s – and want a chance to see what looks set to be a real buzz band up close before they go humongous? Or are they really just here because half the band is System Of A Down?

Scars on Broadway is what SOAD guitarist Daron Malakian and drummer John Dolmayan have been occupying themselves with since System of a Down entered its hiatus. Promising a sound that’s “more rock than metal”, they’ve sold out tonight with little more than expectations, past reputations, and a single solitary song that was trailed on their MySpace page before tonight, forthcoming single ‘They Say’.

Mad-eyed and bushy of beard, Malakian gesticulates wildly throughout the gig, like a mad mountain man given a pulpit and told to get on with it. I’m not sure if he’s just eyeliner’ed to the nines or whether he’s had eye transplants with a cat, but from start to finish he is glaring out into the crowd, with all the piercing intensity of stiletto knife. When his gaze falls upon you it almost feels like it could draw blood.

The promo video for ‘They Say’:

Scars on Broadway- They Say

But when the fans have only been exposed to a single song through a MySpace page though, the gig heaves and sweats without ever exploding. Briefly, as the crowd raises arms and claps along to ‘Chemicals’, the desperate energy of SOAD threatens, nearly, to come out, only to fizzle and hold itself in check.

It’s only during set-closer, for the aforementioned‘They Say’, that the crowd erupts into anything approaching the frenzy you sense the band expected. For all his eager spitting fury, Malakian’s doom-prophet’eering falls short of that offered by the solo work of Serj Tankian, errant SOAD vocalist – maybe Malakian’s rumoured bitterness towards Tankian is because he feels he is lyrically marginalised in System?