Album Review
May. 15th, 2007 05:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tj_dragonbladeLinkin Park: Minutes to Midnight
Historically, Linkin Park has been composed of a relatively balanced blend of hard and soft edges. The new album takes that balance and shifts it a bit. While it's still a blend of hard and soft edges, the hard edges are harder (they drop the f-word in a couple songs, for example, when previously they'd deliberately chosen other ways to express the sentiment for the challenge of it), but they're fewer and farther between. Likewise, the soft edges are softer, and more prolific. Mike Shinoda's vocals are less prominent on this album, leaving most of the songs in Chester's hands and god, but that voice of his is more than up to the task. Unph. He's in wonderful form, careening from sweet to sad to scathing and back again from song to song.Better than sex, that voice. Here and there he pushes farther into the realms of gutteral-throated bleeding-lung vocals than I'd ordinarily care for; the only thing that keeps it barely palatable to me is the fact that even when he's shredding his voice that way, I can still understand every word he says and I'm left vaguely impressed despite myself going '...How in hell does he do this live night after night and still have a voice??' There's a moment in 'Given Up' that...swear to god, it must be mixed in the studio to get that endurance, because nothing human could hold that roar with that strength for that long. O_o
Those moments aside, the album really is a bit softer than I'd have expected, but it's not a bad turn - from the earnest sweetness of 'Leave Out All the Rest' to the bitterness of 'The Little Things Give You Away' to the very U2-esque 'Shadow of the Day'. The electronic elements are toned more to the background and there's a stripped-down feel to the music in many places, almost as if the songs are an acoustic-styled version of something harder; there's a lot of distinctly emo-rock flavoring, particularly on 'Valentine's Day', but they make it all work better than I would have thought. There are moments of political and social commentary, most notably 'Hands Held High'; there's also still the self-loathing anger and emotional venom of relationships gone bad that the earlier albums have taught me to expect of LP. Stylistically, 'No More Sorrow' sticks most closely to their established sound, and is probably my favorite of the hard-edged tracks. Though 'Given Up', which kick-starts the album, has its selling points too. There are a couple songs for the angry playlist, a couple more for the melancholy playlist, and if I had to suggest one improvement for the album, I'd really just want to see a couple more songs on it. It's twelve tracks, fairly standard, but the first track is a short instrumental intro sort of thing, much as found on Meteora, and...the album plays by so fast. It just doesn't feel long enough, though that perception might be primarily due to the spastic fan inside who'd been waiting two or three years for this. ^_^;
On a fandom note, since music inevitibly ties back to fandom with me, 'What I've Done' (the first single - if you're exposed to (US) rock radio even sporadically, chances are good you'll have heard it) has dropped straight into the Hakkai section of the 85 playlist. Specifically, it feels very much like Hakkai laying Gonou to rest at long last. A couple others ping character-association possibilities - 'Leave Out All the Rest' could be an 85-y Gojyo's-inner-emo-boy, a half-melted Konzen exerting heavy influence over Sanzo in a 39 light, or a very OOC sappy Nii-to-Kou thing (or, to jump fandoms, a mellowed-with-maturity Wufei); 'In Pieces' has mild hints of a Nii/Kou flavor - but it's too early to tell if those initial pings will warrant dropping onto playlists.
Ultimately, it's an evolution that works for the band and it's a solidly good album, imho. I'm left hoping that it's not another four years before the next album. ^_^; I'm just hitting the point of remembering enough lyrics to sing along, and...my inner fangirl is just rolling around in a great kittenish ball of Happy. ^_^
This new infusion of Chester!voice to my library also prompts me to decide that now really is the time for that Favorite Voices music post I've been half-composing in my head the past several months, so...expect that sometime in the near future. ^_^
Historically, Linkin Park has been composed of a relatively balanced blend of hard and soft edges. The new album takes that balance and shifts it a bit. While it's still a blend of hard and soft edges, the hard edges are harder (they drop the f-word in a couple songs, for example, when previously they'd deliberately chosen other ways to express the sentiment for the challenge of it), but they're fewer and farther between. Likewise, the soft edges are softer, and more prolific. Mike Shinoda's vocals are less prominent on this album, leaving most of the songs in Chester's hands and god, but that voice of his is more than up to the task. Unph. He's in wonderful form, careening from sweet to sad to scathing and back again from song to song.
Those moments aside, the album really is a bit softer than I'd have expected, but it's not a bad turn - from the earnest sweetness of 'Leave Out All the Rest' to the bitterness of 'The Little Things Give You Away' to the very U2-esque 'Shadow of the Day'. The electronic elements are toned more to the background and there's a stripped-down feel to the music in many places, almost as if the songs are an acoustic-styled version of something harder; there's a lot of distinctly emo-rock flavoring, particularly on 'Valentine's Day', but they make it all work better than I would have thought. There are moments of political and social commentary, most notably 'Hands Held High'; there's also still the self-loathing anger and emotional venom of relationships gone bad that the earlier albums have taught me to expect of LP. Stylistically, 'No More Sorrow' sticks most closely to their established sound, and is probably my favorite of the hard-edged tracks. Though 'Given Up', which kick-starts the album, has its selling points too. There are a couple songs for the angry playlist, a couple more for the melancholy playlist, and if I had to suggest one improvement for the album, I'd really just want to see a couple more songs on it. It's twelve tracks, fairly standard, but the first track is a short instrumental intro sort of thing, much as found on Meteora, and...the album plays by so fast. It just doesn't feel long enough, though that perception might be primarily due to the spastic fan inside who'd been waiting two or three years for this. ^_^;
On a fandom note, since music inevitibly ties back to fandom with me, 'What I've Done' (the first single - if you're exposed to (US) rock radio even sporadically, chances are good you'll have heard it) has dropped straight into the Hakkai section of the 85 playlist. Specifically, it feels very much like Hakkai laying Gonou to rest at long last. A couple others ping character-association possibilities - 'Leave Out All the Rest' could be an 85-y Gojyo's-inner-emo-boy, a half-melted Konzen exerting heavy influence over Sanzo in a 39 light, or a very OOC sappy Nii-to-Kou thing (or, to jump fandoms, a mellowed-with-maturity Wufei); 'In Pieces' has mild hints of a Nii/Kou flavor - but it's too early to tell if those initial pings will warrant dropping onto playlists.
Ultimately, it's an evolution that works for the band and it's a solidly good album, imho. I'm left hoping that it's not another four years before the next album. ^_^; I'm just hitting the point of remembering enough lyrics to sing along, and...my inner fangirl is just rolling around in a great kittenish ball of Happy. ^_^
This new infusion of Chester!voice to my library also prompts me to decide that now really is the time for that Favorite Voices music post I've been half-composing in my head the past several months, so...expect that sometime in the near future. ^_^
