"I don't get it when people complain that baseball games are too long," says Daron Malakian, watching the action from a seat behind home plate at Dodger Stadium during one of the team's recent home games. "This is my favorite place in the world. I don't care how long it goes, I'll be here to the end."
This most wholesome and mainstream of settings probably isn't the place you'd picture as Malakian's chosen refuge, given the apocalyptic, dissident, disillusioned, angry, irreligious scenarios that belch from the self-titled debut album by his new band, Scars on Broadway.
"You've never seen the sky like this / You never want to die like this," he sings in "Universe," a grand anthem that describes what might be an environmental catastrophe. In the Bowie-tinged ballad "3005," he watches from a spaceship as civilization and "resurrection junkies" -- his term for those addicted to religion -- sink below the surface. And what is it they say in the band's single "They Say"? They say "it's all about to end."
"It's what's around me. It's what I hear, it's what I see, it's what I'm absorbing like a sponge," says Malakian, 33, eating a pregame hot dog and garlic fries in the bar of the stadium's Dugout Club. "It's the times we're living in, and I think as an artist I'm just trying to put my finger on that."
Not that he's on a mission. In fact, when he writes -- always alone at home in Glendale -- it's more like a mystery.
"I consider myself a medium to it all. There's something there and then there's a song and then there's me. A lot of times, I don't feel responsible for the songs myself. But that's my job or my place in life, to keep my search and catch the ideas before they pass me by."
Malakian's methods helped make his other band, System of a Down, one of the most commercially successful and critically admired groups in hard rock, and that audience is primed for Tuesday's release of "Scars on Broadway." Malakian isn't the only System mainstay in the group -- he brought bandmate John Dolmayan into Scars as co-leader after a couple of other drummers didn't work out.
Along with Metallica's upcoming return, the Scars album figures to be one of the hard-rock highlights of the second half of the year. "They Say" registered 100,000 downloads when it went up free on iTunes, and the group (rounded out by guitarist Franky Perez, keyboardist Danny Shamoun and bassist Dominic Cifarelli) made a few buzz-building appearances in the spring, including sets at Coachella and the KROQ Weenie Roast.
