WAS INTENDED TO BE POSTED AFTER MC5's FIRST POST IN THE THREAD
First, let us note I just started a holier-than-thou review thread.
Linkin Park's original appeal was that they're trash-pop, but with a rock/rap/nu-metal genetic line which at the time was the most popular version of "rock" and they introduced electronic usage to it. And there's nothing wrong with enjoying trash-pop, it's designed to make you enjoy the hooks and you have to ignore the lyrics. That's the trash part, because they're tumor causing if you read them, and generic if you're lucky. And Linkin Park had an ungodly debut album in its terms of writing hooks that could show up in any pop song but injected them into a genre that was not particularly radio friendly by design. Listen to Hybrid Theory, look at how the verses-choruses-bridges all work, it's blatant pop-song construction, but the instruments, style of singing, etc. their use is all inherent rock/rap that the 90s was rife with, they distilled the two into a commercial monster.
Hybrid Theory is not intelligent, but it's hard to say it's not constructed specifically. It's easy to forget how something like Crawling compares to the pop-rock scene it was inviting itself to. Sugar Ray. Smash Mouth. It lost none of the hooking choruses, the meaningless versus, it just brought it in a way the radio/MTV audience was not used to if they were not privy to the metal/electronic/etc. parents that birthed Linkin Park. Compared to the radio of the 1990s, Linkin Park WAS "heavy."
Then they tried to strike out on their own, and it fell apart for a while.
We should also note, as others have on here, that I've ever increasingly become easy, I'm a nymphomaniac porn star or something in regard to how I'll like music anymore. Thus why Lady Gaga and who knows what else showed up on my end of the year list last time. (Which would look nothing like my 2005 one if such a thing existed.) But at the same time my 5/5 zone increased to become harder and harder to penetrate. Most media has gone this way for me, as I've raised for more tolerance to things are just average or good, and heightened the level of a "classic" and this is part of why my
A Thousand Suns stance was what it was.
But really I shouldn't rehash what was said there:
viewtopic.php?p=1258461#p1258461However, for those who missed the point in my simple satire,
A Thousand Suns's relevance is that it's not like the rest of Linkin Park. Another
Meteora or
Minutes to Midnight would have been diminishing returns. There was nowhere for Linkin Park to go after the original, they had nearly perfectly mined the well, you can still go back and the album still has it all, the hooks are unchanged. And things like Numb that came out on the later albums was what they missed while making the first one. So after was a b-side album with a couple misplaced tracks followed up by a c-side album with a misplaced b-side that was left off the album.
But
Hybrid Theory isn't where the band peaks.
Reanimation is, and anyone who argues otherwise is a Communist Kenyan Muslim. Nothing the band will ever do can compare, it's almost a mistake that they did it because it will forever overshadow anything they actually do. The only thing keeping it from classic status is the phone calls and a pair of dud tracks, but it's in the next tier. If they had released
Reanimation first, they would never have sold a billion copies but it'd probably have been a cult hit that got all the indie cred.
I know a lot of people who hate
Reanimation and adore the albums on either side. They're wrong, but they're the majority.
And
Reanimation is why I like
A Thousand Suns, the experimentation. With
Reanimation they had somewhere to start as they completely reworked these beloved by millions songs, for the latest they started from scratch and instead of covering the same rehashed expected bases they've been over many times they went somewhere else. And delivered the best song since
Reanimation (maybe a few as I've re-listened) so I had little to complain about.
A Summary: After
Minutes to Midnight, I not only wasn't even interested in the album I didn't know it released until someone made the claim it was "techno." And this one has made me automatically interested in the next. Knock a point off and make it 3/5 - Good, I almost did, but decided to be provocative like a real reviewer.
I won't tell any of you that you're wrong on something like this, I don't really care. I only give my views on music and TV shows and such so those few who agree with me can maybe take a chance when I actually do praise something. And I don't mind having a friendly debate. See Jae taking a look at Raising Hope and this, I don't mind he doesn't like either, but we've liked enough common stuff that there's a reason for both of us to investigate what the other likes. I look into the things he suggests, and vice versa, it's not perfect 100%, and the actual agreement is far lower, but we hit enough for each other that we pay attention to the views of the other. I'm sure Jae wouldn't have given two shits about Linkin Park's latest but I think he likely looked into it because I was not tearing it apart. That's all that really matters in our suggestionship.
Then we have wild sex for hours and hours, but not even the porn sites will let us post the videos.Oh, and Fort Minor's album was easily better than both the prior Linkin Park sequel albums. And is a top four Linkin Park universe album.
And nothing will ever be worse than
Out of Ashes.
Lamrock wrote:(Fun-Fact: There's a park in Seattle called "Lincoln Park")
FUNFACT: They were going to call themselves that but the URL was taken.
for taking advice
) I'll listen to it after a week or two.
