First things first: I like Linkin Park.
Seriously, I do. Let me explain myself.
They're one of the first bands I was ever exposed to; while I had certainly grown up listening to music, as my Dad was a big fan of old 60's and 70's pop and off-rock (and, quite randomly, Enya), I just basically liked what he liked. All that changed around the time Meteora came out: my oldest sister picked me up from school one day and popped in the album, and after a couple songs asked me if I liked it. I don't know what clicked that day, but that album forged a connection with me. I liked how in-your-face they were, how much bombast they possessed, and all in all, just how cool they sounded. I had never really listened to much rap before, and they were my first introductions to rock and rap. It defined a lot of my future tastes, and I'll always thank my sister for that.
So, at Christmas, I received Meteora and Hybrid Theory, their first two full-length albums, and those spun in my mom's CD player that I borrowed for quite a while. From there I branched out into other bands, other genres, but I have those CDs to thank for my love of music today.
The year Minutes to Midnight came out I was definitely excited - it was all over the radio at the time. Soon after launch day, I decided to pick it up; I listened to it, and found myself liking it... but something was missing. At this very moment I'm still not sure what it was that really stopped me from fully enjoying the album, but there were some things that irked me: mainly how politically charged it was, how Chester Bennington (lead vocals) took so much emphasis away from Mike Shinoda (backup vocals, rapper). Shinoda's song "Hands Held High" carried most of the force, and yet I never really liked political songs - there are some System of a Down songs I still can't stand to listen to for that very reason. It was definitely a solid album, but not on par with what I considered their classics. Over the three to four years afterwards, I just kind of walked away from the band for a little bit.
Come 2010, I heard they were putting in a new album: A Thousand Suns. It was promised to bring a whole new sound to their audience, a refresher for those a bit jaded on today's music. By this time I had grown fond of Linkin Park again, especially after finding out about bands like Coal Chamber and Motograter in the past, so this was met with some derision. The couple of videos I had listened to didn't really impress me, and I really didn't think about the album again until today, when I sat down and listened to the album in full (sort of - piece by piece on Youtube).
And for anyone who follows me on Twitter, you know my reactions full well. If you don't, here's a brief summary:
It sucks.
It's a new sound all right... but God help me if anyone will ever truly identify it as Linkin Park. In a wild turn of events, the boys have gone from a rap-rock/nu-metal-esque style to what I can only guess is some sort of attempt at progressive rock(?) mixed with synth and techno. It's a jarring shift to a style almost never seen in the band. Now, I've seen this kind of shift done before to much better success - Disturbed switched from nu-metal in The Sickness to a more solid hard-rock/alt-metal in Believe, to come full circle in their magnum opus Ten Thousand Fists - but Linkin Park's attempt at a new genre comes off as way too experimental.
One major problem lies with the length of the album. There are fifteen tracks on here, and yet it clocks in at a mere 47 minutes and 45 seconds. Five of these songs almost don't make it to 2 minutes. The first three songs last 2:01, 0:57, and 4:13 respectively, and they're meant to link together - yet it's only the third song that carries any proper lyrics. Hell, one of the songs on this album is only eighteen seconds long, and it's the fourth song on the album! They're barely even proper intros: one of them is some speech Martin Luther King Jr. did while synth plays behind him and slowly modulates his voice down in octaves towards a robotic Terminator style voice that I suppose is meant to "haunt", but only serves to confuse. Shinoda raps here in When They Come For Me and Wretches and Kings, and amazingly enough they're two of the strongest songs on the album, even though Shinoda sounds more like Vanilla Ice than anything else.
The second problem is, as mentioned before, is that the album feels like one giant experiment - so many ideas and concepts are thrown at the wall, and very few of them sticks. In a baffling move, Chester raps in Blackout, and suffice to say it is the worst song on the album, perhaps in their entire career. Chester does his signature screaming voice on the song as well as rapping, but sometimes he breaks into a strange, cringe-worthy falsetto that just breaks the song into pieces at every attempt. This is preceeded by Waiting for the End, where Shinoda sings. Not in the background either, but in the foreground. He has his own stanzas. Unfortunately, he ... sucks. They try to deviate from their established styles, and while it would work with more cohesion, the fact that they also shifted styles, album construction, and swapped roles to-and-fro just make everything muddied, bland, and unworkable, almost approaching unlistenable.
You know what experiment worked? The Japanese flute in Nobody's Listening, and guess what? That flute didn't spill its contents over the CD like a knocked-over glass of milk, and therein lies the difference.
The third problem: it's not rap-rock. Call it snobby, but it's what I listen to Linkin Park for. It's how I was introduced to them; it's what I associate them with. Call their quality how you see it, but with songs like Nobody's Listening, Hit the Floor, and Papercut on past albums, they for the most part stuck with their strengths and created quality pieces that people could get attached to. Sure, they deviated from time to time, adding instruments, strategic placements of turntables, and complete DJ instrumentals at the penultimate track mark, but it worked. Here, it's all a bunch of prog-rock fuzz that never comes together, and instead only angers those that came into the band expecting something from some of the first to straddle the genres of rap and rock.
I don't know what else to say, to be quite honest. Korn says they'll be adding elements of dub-step to their next album, and even though I usually hate the hell out of the genre, they managed to make it work in the first single they released (Step Up). Still, though, this is yet another band that really got me into nu-metal, so here's to hoping the situation doesn't repeat itself. I still like Linkin Park, but half the fun's gone. I worry for the other bands I love.
That was my piece. Whew...
P.S. After writing this up, I found a rather scathing review of the album done by a Jim Faber of the NY Daily news. Below it are the comments; one of which made me laugh out loud. Here it is:
"Jim Faber. Who the hell are you? You dont have any sense of music and if you do all you can listen is ****. Linkin Park has moved on, they are not the types of bands that just stick to one thing. Its an amazing and superb album. This blog post is a shame on NYDaily News that they have such sick people writing such sick stories on one of the most searched topics on the web. #EPICFAIL for NYDaily and Jim Faber should sit at home and make cookies and listen to Radio News cuz thats what he can do. Utterly useless review. You think the first song is like a Justin Bieber thing? OMG... i wont even let you live in my underpants now! Sick Sick Sick Review and Jim Faber is !@#$%^&*@#$@#$%!@$%@#$%@%!$%!@#%!@$@#$#@$%#$^$%"
He should sit at home and make cookies. That's chuckle-worthy.
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