Marketing
The initial single from the album was a 2-track promo including "Empty Walls" and "The Unthinking Majority", released on September 10. Tankian immediately appeared on MTV's "You Rock The Deuce" program. Meanwhile a music-video of "Feed Us" was released in Sweden and on UK MTV. The album was released October 22 2007, and opened at #4 with 66,000 USA units sold according to the Billboard 200 trade listing. By September 2010 the album had sold 319,000 copies total.
Music-videos of the album's songs were each filmed by discrete directors. Tankian revealed: "I asked each of the directors for their visual interpretation of my work. They were asked not to write treatments and that they could make whatever they liked. The results have been overwhelmingly amazing". Initially some videos were released as 'limited edition' premiums. All videos were later freely offered on Tankian's website and his YouTube channel. Some of these "official videos" were alternate versions released one version at a time- suggesting incrementally evolving narrative.
Collectible versions of the album include an instrumental disk offered by Serjical Strike/Reprise Records; and the "final master" from Reprise intended for specific journalists and reviewers. That embargoed disk was labeled "Smart Talk" . Previously an undated, un-mastered 'Smart Talk' promo featured these same 'final versions' of the songs; but the sequence of tracks ten and eleven was juxtaposed.
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