Review: Linkin Park: A Thousand Suns

Having been a Linkin Park fan for years, I had to give this one a go. Forgive me readers, this will be my first music review.

I feel it's almost necessary for a band to grow and mature if they want to stay relevant. Or at least experiment with different styles if they want to have new fans, even at the risk of alienating their old ones. Sure, there are those bands that find a comfort zone and stick to it.

Sure, L.P. COULD do that,
but they haven't.

Instead of giving us a "normal album", they are giving you a 49 minute surreal journey. Is there an overarching plot? Maybe. Maybe not. It's up to you to judge that, should you take the risk and allow them to guide you though. The one thing I have to say if you're going to take this on is:

Take the entire album as an experience.

I believe this concept album (as they have called it) is not meant to be experienced in a song by song manner. Sure a couple sections can stand alone, but some parts can't and aren't meant to. A lot of it is surreal sounds warped and shaped into something else, some are made purely as transitions for other songs. It's experimental, something L.P. has done but not this extensively.

Below I will try to rate each track and describe it., For reference I bought the Itunes Deluxe edition, which had not only the tracks alone, but the entire "experience" in a single 49 minute track with no breaks. Also has a song for their 8-bit video game they produced (which I Won't review).

1. The Requiem: A creepy surreal start with a high pitched chime and a young girl singing the chorus. It sets the mood for the album.
2. The Radiance: Robert Oppenheimer voice clip in here with some more surreal shifting that kinda jarrs the flow they have just set. There's a machine-like rift in the b.g. that changes the pace.
3. Burning In The Skies: Melodramatic L.P. song
4. Empty Spaces: an 18 second clip where harmonious crickets is downed out by the sound of artillery fire. A transition piece.

5. When They Come For Me: Mike Shinoda rapping about not being a run of the mill artist, which has been a theme in his works since the band was almost written of as being "made" when the first started, and saying he's saying instead of staying stuck on the band's past, to catch up to where they are now. Not the strongest we've seen from the rapper, but it's different enough to be noted. Also having M******F***** as the chorus is hard to ignore. A little danceable too, at least that's how I visualize it in my head.

6. Robot Boy: Dramatic Chester only song singing, almost contradict-ally, about the passive attitudes of people in pain for a long period of time. A echo-ic beat and one of the better songs of the album. Orchestral even.

7. Jornada Del Muerto: More experimental sound shifting.

8. Waiting For The End: Sounds like the whole band here, a little more on the rap with some mellow drama, but is a bit of the familiar with a bit of the experimental. It's kinda tribal with the cow bells and high pitched notes you hear repeatedly. The song itself is a journey, loss, how to move on, getting through, and starting over.

9. Blackout: a very slow build into an almost 80s experimental track with Chester and some turn table techniques. probably the weakest "song" in the batch for me. Mike does come in near the end, but I just can't seem to get through the song by itself, and most of the time I block it out.

10. Wretches And Kings: This sounds the most like the L.P. we knew back with Meteora then but still isn't quite "old school" with a sound clip from Mario Savio integrated with it. Cheser and Mike duel with their various styles with distinctive parts for each instrument giving and taking with one another to complete the track.

11. Wisdom, Justice, And Love: A clip of Martin Luther King speaking, slowly transformed to something someone might say as Godly, or unearthly - might be better. I think it's one of the few clips I've heard of the man that hasn't been the I Have a Dream speech, and I think it's pretty powerful, though it serves only as a transition for the most part.

12. Iridescent: Mike Shinoda singing. more mellow dramatic and a bit weak. Almost sounds more like a church hymn.

13. Fallout: some more refrain heavily warped and changed into Mike Shinoda.

14. The Catalyst: The single for the album, pretty L.P., mellow yet cutting edge. Catchy and had to grow on me. I heard a lot of it before making an entry into a contest to have a remix featured on their Myspace page, so it took me awhile to come back around to the song since I became sick of it before it was even released.

15. The Messenger: Chester rounding out the end with an instrumental. It's different because though msot of the album seems doom and gloom, though this song starts that way, there is a glimmer of hope in love, that love will heal, and make you see, whereas life makes you blind.

I wasn't sure I was going to like it. Honestly I sampled some of the songs and thought "what the hell is this?" like most longstanding L.P. fans might have done. But being a fan of ambient/instrumental works, and trusting the band wouldn't go completely off the deep end, I bought it.

The overall roller coaster of such a downward spiral of the human condition.

It is hardly a sell out album of any kind considering most people into "mainstream" music don't get into stuff like this. It's different and it's a change from what people know, a much more dramatic change from Minutes to Midnight. I would be more weary if they were still producing exactly the same music they were when they came out.

This isn't the same band that made 'Hybrid Theory' all those years ago, and I'm glad.

But this is also an album that you will either like, or not, for your own reasons. You'll be able to take away a couple of the songs that are actually songs, but I think you're losing out if you don't at least attempt to take the entire album as one experience as it was designed.

I won't give a rating this time. This should just serve as as the brochure for the trip you are about to take.