A Thousand Suns [Explicit] By Linkin Park
‘A Thousand Suns’
We were not making an album.
For months, we’d been destroying and rebuilding our band. The experiments that resulted filled the studio hard drive with diverse, abstract sounds. Amorphous echoes, cacophonous samples, and handmade staccato merged into wandering, elusive melody. Each track felt like a hallucination.
We didn’t know if any of those unorthodox ideas could be incorporated into a traditional album, but we knew we didn’t want our next album to be predictable. Sitting together in the same studio where we made our first album, all six of us voiced a commitment to going out on a limb, to making something truly daring. We asked ourselves: were we all earnestly willing, more than ever before, to abandon the precepts of commercial ambition in pursuit of what we believe to be honest art?
The inclination to begin writing conventional songs for a conventional album came and went. The temptation to adjust our creative vision to fulfill expectations beyond our studio walls yielded to the audacious ambition of what he hoped to achieve as a band. The two years of making A Thousand Suns marked our exhilarating, surrealistic, and often challenging journey into the creative unknown.
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A Natural Extension of MtM,
If you can believe it, this is the first review I’ve ever written for an album, despite being an amazon customer for years. Why? Because I’m just so damn disappointed in all the negative reviews of A Thousand Suns.
First of all, let me say that I’m not a lyrics person. What I take away from LP’s music is a feeling, an emotion, and so far I gotta admit that I’m loving the feeling I get from this album. No, it is not like any of their previous works (though I think we all saw where they might be going as a band after MtM). No, it is not nearly as angry as Hybrid Theory. And no, it is not nearly as catchy as Meteora. So what the hell is it?
To me, it’s a recovery album. This may be lost on some readers, but if i picture LP’s albums as a man going through life, I see their early music as a very wounded and angry man. The catharsis in listening to those albums comes from realizing that not only does someone else out there hurt as much as you, someone out there may actually hurt even more. I revel in listening to those early CDs for that reason. When Reanimation came out, I saw a slightly more playful side to LP. The wounds were still there, but they were being examined now, looked at in an almost clinical, curious way. Minutes to Midnight disappointed me at first, I’ll admit it. The wounded man was no longer angry, but I still was. It took me several looped listens to come to terms with the fact that he had moved on, and was beginning to let some of the old grudges go. It’s not a tired album – far from it – but MtM does give one the sense that LP was getting tired of fighting all the time. That they were searching for solace.
A Thousand Suns, then, in my view, is Linkin Park’s first glimpse of solace. Listening to it, I see the wounded man internalizing his anger differently now than in Hybrid Theory, taking the weight of his troubles on his own shoulders rather than throwing them onto others. A salve of sorts is applied to some of the old scars, though a few new cuts are evident too. It’s not a happy album by any means, but it is peaceful, in a way only LP can make industrial noise sound. It’s also not a simple album; I am sure that future listens will reveal even more about the music to me. But for now, I felt the need to let other hesitant buyers know that I trust LP pretty implicitly with my musical soul. Whatever journey they want to take me on, I’m willing to go for the ride. And I’m willing to grow up with them too, if that’s what they ask of me.
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|The Dark Side of the Park,
What do you do when you’re a top-selling rap-rock act and your genre has long since expired? The answer is simple: Evolve. In 2007, Linkin Park did just that. With the release of their polarizing third album, “Minutes to Midnight,” they brought an unmistakable pop-rock element to the table, downplaying both the rap and the rock elements that made them such a hit in the first place. While it performed well enough commercially, it alienated a good chunk of their fanbase, paving the way for a predictable “return to their roots” album. Unfortunately for that chunk of fans, the band’s latest offering, “A Thousand Suns” is anything but predictable or reminiscent of the Linkin Park of yesteryear. And believe it or not, it’s a good thing.
Trading in the undeniable hooks and chunky guitar riffs that populated their earlier albums for synthesizers and hip-hop beats, “A Thousand Suns” is certainly a tough cookie to swallow. While the tasty licks of guitar-God Brad Delson (sarcasm) will forever be missed, the band more than makes up for it in ample amounts of ambience. A semi-concept album, “A Thousand Suns” brings to mind a more angsty version of “Year Zero,” with its themes of war and humanity. You may wonder if a band like Linkin Park is up to the task of making such a bold artistic statement, but surprisingly enough, they pull it off rather competently. With Rick Rubin once again serving as co-producer, the band gives the set a centralized theme and sound, even if the songs themselves wander down different paths. Sure, if you strip away the various spoken word and instrumental interludes that fill out the record, you’re only left with nine full-length songs, but within these tracks, the band runs the gamut from hip-hop and electronica to pop and even progressive. Somehow though, these songs manage to sound alien when placed outside of their element, thus ensuring that “A Thousand Suns” is an album that can only be appreciated in its proper form, from front to back.
While “A Thousand Suns” may not be exactly what everyone wants from Linkin Park, at the end of the day, no one can accuse them of repeating themselves or recording the same album twice. At this point in their career, it would be all too easy to rest on their laurels and keep churning out “One Step Closer” clones. It’s an album that lacks commercial edge and takes more than a few listens to fully sink in, but when approached with an open mind, it reveals itself as one of the band’s most inspiring and definitive pieces of music. If you’re hoping to get your white-boy angst on with this record, you may feel Linkin Park owe you a thousand apologies for “A Thousand Suns,” but in the end, they don’t, and really, you should have grown out of it by now.
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|Their best yet,
The fact that there are roughly the same number of one star reviews as five star reviews is evidence that opinion is very much polarized. You love it or you hate it.
I’m firmly in the latter camp. This is a groundbreaking album that goes against the grain of instant gratification in a low-attention, i-tune obsessed, twittering world.
Do yourself a favor. Keep an open mind, listen to it straight through with no interruptions and without multi- tasking. Repeat and then repeat again. If you still hate it – fair enough. For me, this is one of the best albums of recent years – a truly monumental work…
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