Linkin Park is Back : Minutes to Midnight

[Poeman]

edit......

 

[Dodger]

they still have screaming...

yeah but not on every single track dude. IMO, the album is way better for it. LP don't have the drum beats nor the guitars to carry a heavy metal track. After a while Chester just seemed like he was whinnying and shouting instead of singing.

 

[Poeman]

i thought there was enough screaming

 

[Colossal Spoons]

Actually, it's not that I think there should be more screaming on this album. The screaming is just different this time around.

 

[Poeman]

i change my mind

Bleed it out is the best ****ing song on this album

Yea here we go for the hundredth time,
Hand grenade pins in every line,
Throw 'em up and let something shine.
Going out of my ****ing mind.
Filthy mouth, no excuse.
Find a new place to hang this noose.
String me up from atop these roofs.
Knot it tight so I won't get loose.
Truth is you can stop and stare,
Run myself out and no one cares.
Dug a trench out, laid down there
With a shovel up out to reach somewhere.
Yea someone pour it in,
Make it a dirt dance floor again.
Say your prayers and stomp it out,
When they bring that chorus in.

 

[Cmill216]

Minutes to Midnight lyrically and musically pisses all over Meteora. The only track off the latter that even holds a candle to any tracks off Midnight is "Faint", and that song's big problem is that Chester's vocals were tripled so much on the studio version that when they sing "Faint" live he sounds terrible.

By comparison, listen to the AOL Sessions of "No More Sorrow" and "Given Up". 99.9% like the record.

 

[Cmill216]

"Bleed It Out" Live on SNL

 

[Poeman]

no more sorrow + bleed it out + leave out all the rest = WOW best lyrics

 

[GoldenAgeHero]

meteora is still better then this album, i think u guys are being suckered by LP new look. not only that but the album feel like a freshman album.

 

[Kaleb]

meteora is still better then this album, i think u guys are being suckered by LP new look. not only that but the album feel like a freshman album.

This is the reason why I like this album, cause it has that raw sound to it, compared to the over produced metora

 

[guitarsingerguy]

I'm just curious what you guys see in this band. I've never been much of a fan, but after watching them on SNL, I've never been so bored with anything in my life. The second singer (that guy that actually just sorta talks) looked very uncomfortable playing both his guitar and keyboard. Everyone else looked like they were just bored and wanted to be home. The guy up there that looked like he had the most talent was the DJ. What is it that you find appealing about the band? I'm not trying to flame. I'm simply curious.

 

[Kaleb]

They were performing on snl, I would want to leave as soon as possible as well.

 

[GoldenAgeHero]

snal was pretty funny with molly shannon being back.

 

[Colossal Spoons]

Giving the CD a few more listens; I really dislike:

Leave Out All The Rest
Valentine's Day :
In Between
The Little Things Give You Away

Other than those songs, it's a pretty decent CD. Guess I gave it a hasty judgment yesterday but listening to it a few times while stufying, I've groen to like it. It's still no Meteora

 

[Colossal Spoons]

"Bleed It Out" Live on SNL

That was awesome. Shino gets props for some good lyrics with awesome delivery. Chest screaming was gold as usual lol.

 

[Cmill216]

Slew of album reviews (including a very positive one from Rolling Stone):

SOURCE: Rolling Stone

4 out of 5

Rap metal is dead. Linkin Park are not, because they were always more than the meager sum of that combination -- more pop and classic rock in their riffs, hooks and drive, even on Collision Course, their 2004 mash-up with Jay-Z.

On Minutes to Midnight, co-produced by Rick Rubin, Linkin Park are more of something else -- topical -- and furiously good at it. In the last song, "The Little Things Give You Away," the band coolly torpedoes George W. Bush's petty, disastrous arrogance on Iraq and New Orleans (for starters), building from acoustic strum and soft-shoe electronics to magisterial Seventies-arena guitar and lacerating disgust. "All you've ever wanted was someone to truly look up to you," Chester Bennington sings. "And six feet underwater/I do."

That's not all. Bennington is not going over old-girlfriend ground when he promises, "Your time is borrowed," in the hammering thrash of "No More Sorrow." And Mike Shinoda's state-of-disbelief rap "Hands Held High" comes with military-funeral drums and an "amen" chorus. This would be as much fun as a filibuster if Linkin Park did not pay equal attention to the punch and detail in the gritty stomp "Bleed It Out" and the balled-fist guilt of "What I've Done." "Shadow of the Day" is a too-literal echo of Joshua Tree-era U2, but most of Minutes is honed, metallic pop with a hip-hop stride and a wake-up kick. "What the f*** is wrong with me?" Bennington barks over the jingle bells and distortion in "Given Up."

The answer all over this record: nothing that getting off your ass can't fix.

SOURCE: The Dallas News

B

No American rock act is as passively precocious as Linkin Park. The chagrin and hunger stirred up by the purposeful SoCal rap-rock wunderkinds has no contemporary peer, except perhaps by Kelly Clarkson.

But it certainly aids the construction of hype, and Linkin Park's third studio CD is easily the year's most anticipated modern rock release. However, the band did warn us that its new material would trumpet a reconstituted Linkin Park.

Sure enough, Minutes to Midnight has about as much in common with Hybrid Theory and Meteora as Peter Gabriel's So does with early Genesis. It's highly refined, mellow and cerebral, and structurally glossy, with as many silken songwriting turns as strident ones.

Linkin Park predictably de-emphasized both vocalist/MC Mike Shinoda's rapping and turntablist Joseph Hahn's sampling, effectively reassigning each to multi-instrumentalist (Mr. Shinoda) and rhythm generator-artist (Mr. Hahn). Most of Minutes to Midnight's songs lose crunch and vitality because of it, though in return they gain civility, identity and finesse.

Only two tracks truly rock: the hand clap-paced screamo exercise "Given Up" and the Fear Factory-like chugger "No More Sorrow." Others recall a Motown-bred AC/DC ("Bleed It Out"), the Fray ("In Between," on which Mr. Shinoda sings and Mr. Hahn outputs a sweet crinkled-paper beat) and U2 ("Shadow of the Day").

The standouts defy such trite pigeonholing. "What I've Done" is a snappy and grand first single; "Hands Held High" combines gospel and rap with political ire; and the lavish harmony-layered "The Little Things Give You Away" closes the disc with uncharacteristic grace.

SOURCE: LA Times

If I were a band therapist, saving rock legends from self-destruction in stupidly expensive weekly sessions, I'd offer one key bromide to the members of Linkin Park: Dare to be who you are. Running from the past into the arms of a new image may seem necessary when a mid-life crisis afflicts — many have done it, from Michael Jackson to Depeche Mode to Metallica to everybody's role model, U2. But such a move only works if there's substance beneath the semantics. And that pith almost always flows from what made you great in the first place.

That's the case with "Minutes to Midnight," the first proper studio album from Linkin Park since 2003's "Meteora." (Interim activities have included a remix project, a live DVD and a mash-up collaboration with hip-hop kingpin Jay-Z.) Hyped as a leap beyond rapcore and nu-metal — the subgenres brought to commercial heights by these superstar sons of Agoura Hills — the album has all the markers of a credibility move.

Reputation doctor Rick Rubin produced; the band used vintage instruments and experimented with roles throughout the recording process; DJ Joe Hahn put down his scratch bible and got more atmospheric; the first video, for the headbanging "What I've Done," was shot in the desert.

Yet "Minutes to Midnight" isn't valuable because it does away with Linkin Park's formulas. It's best when the band reinvests in those codes, looking for new ways to interpret them.

Certain readers might be wondering what of value might be found in rapcore and nu-metal, two of contemporary pop's most derided subgenres. (Other equally unattractive terms for them include rap-rock, rap-metal and aggro metal.)

Both styles refreshed heavy rock a decade ago by connecting it to other styles, especially hip-hop. The indie-funk of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, the prog-rock hip-hop of Rage Against the Machine and Linkin Park's own arty, melodic blend of post-punk and West Coast rap all fall within their parameters.

As sometimes happens when a musical style finds its lumpen proletariat, though, rapcore and nu-metal took a hit when it became the favorite music of the steroid-popping alpha dogs associated with the sexist backlash of the late 1990s. Limp Bizkit ascended, and the world rolled its eyes and turned away.

Meanwhile, Linkin Park and a few other artists kept creating music that explored how hip-hop's turntable manipulations, cool rhyming and collage effect might connect to rock's guitar onslaughts and howling emotionalism.

No wonder teens loved this stuff: It made a significant leap by treating their casual approach to multiculturalism as normal, and rejecting the hierarchies that declared rock more significant than hip-hop, and vice-versa.

For Linkin Park, this refusal of formal boundaries also connected to lyrical content — Chester Bennington, the androgynous punk who can scream or croon, and Mike Shinoda, the swaggering rapper who holds his machismo close to his chest, work together to express the confusion and hope of kids for whom identity is no simple game.

Linkin Park's members were mere lads when they made those early records, wearing their hearts on their Stussy sleeves. On "Minutes to Midnight," these now-30ish musicians grapple with what makes a sound endure beyond the cultural confluence that inspired it.

There's a contemplative feel throughout the album, especially on the pretty, somewhat indistinguishable ballads where Bennington fully takes the lead.

This is the kind of music artists make to find out who they'll become next: It reaches toward many influences — notably U2 (some songs invoke the Irish rock group almost note-for-note), but also Tool, Evanescence, Nirvana and Coldplay — without committing to anything.

The sound finds its mojo whenever Linkin Park remembers that its music is, as Shinoda said in one interview, "the product of a new culture" — one in which "organic" is only preferable to synthetic when you're buying apples at Whole Foods.

Shinoda, who co-produced with Rubin, clearly enjoyed the stretch the veteran studio guru demanded.

He even tries crooning one song, "In Between," and though it's not a powerful vocal (and the lyrics are worse), its Postal Service-style bed of electronics is pretty interesting. When Shinoda does rap, he really delivers.

A lefty-activist focus sparks the relaxed delivery he's developed in his other group, Fort Minor, and in "Hands Held High" he goes a step further than the average pop protest song, not just shouting "No more Bush," but asking his fans to question why they snicker at the news instead of taking action.

"Minutes to Midnight" becomes more ponderous when it becomes a bid for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, with Bennington brooding about heartbreak and social injustice over Brad Delson's soaring guitars and Rob Bourdon's rolling, martial (read: U2-like) drums.

These earnestly, artfully derivative songs don't show enough love for what makes Linkin Park compelling. Hahn's electronics, for example, are sometimes so underplayed that you want to reach into your stereo and yank them out. That's a mistake.

Some songs do get the balance right. "Leave Out All the Rest," a meditation on mortality destined for innumerable MySpace memorial pages, features the group's layering technique at its most gorgeous — a Moog-ish synthesizer lick is topped by a bubbling percussion loop; live drums and bass add warmth, and Bennington's angry-choirboy vocals build until everything intertwines in a gently compressed chorus.

Such careful constructions shine a light on how Linkin Park might continue to mature, by remembering the therapeutic wisdom of comedian Al Franken's creation Stuart Smalley: They're good enough, they're smart enough and darn it, people really like them.

 

[The Squirrel]

I watched them perform "What I've Done." on SNL. It was alright.

I didn't catch their second performance.

Was it a harder song?

 

[Cmill216]

"What I've Done" was bloody terrible on SNL.

But "Bleed It Out" kicked ass.

 

[The Squirrel]

SOURCE: Rolling Stone

Oh good. They joined the "Let's bash Bush because it's cool and hip and popular" bandwagon.

 

[Colossal Spoons]

Why did "What I've Done" suck on SNL?

 

[Cmill216]

Why did "What I've Done" suck on SNL?

Bennington's vocals were crazy off.

 

[TheAlmightyFuzz]

I live in the Town & Country area, between Memorial and Hillsborough.
Small world, I used to live all around Orlando, but mainly in the Kissimmee area.

I used to live in the Citrus Park/Westchase area. Now I'm in Seminole County, kinda weird.

Anyway, this is Linkin Park's worst album without a doubt.

 

[Colossal Spoons]

Bennington's vocals were crazy off.

He looked to be straining a bit by the end of "Bleed It Out" too.

 

[Strong Guy]

Worst album?How come?I thought the songs were cool.Well,they have made some new changes to their music but i think they made a good effort.

 

[TheAlmightyFuzz]

Bleed It Out is good, I'm listening to it quite a bit.

Anyway, this thread is making me want to vomit out of my eyes.