When they came out of nowhere, guns blazin’ back in 2000 with their killer debut album Hybrid Theory, Linkin Park broke so much new ground in the rap/nu metal genre that even the most hardened music critics couldn’t help but admit the boys from Cali were packing the musical equivalent of a hand full of aces.
Hybrid Theory was stacked full of powerful, catchy riffs and hooks, which were perfectly accentuated by the irrepressible anger of front man Chester Bennington’s shredded vocals and Mike Shinoda’s excellently written rhymes.
Now, nearly a decade later Linkin Park have released their fourth offering, A Thousand Suns, and sadly it’s even less appealing than 2007’s Minutes To Midnight, which pretty much makes it the band’s worst album to date. When a band opens an album with not one, but two tracks that are largely just a collection of different noises overlaid with a spattering of vocals and a 50-second sound bite, you know right then and there that they’re running out of ideas.
Read the whole enchilada here…
-ST
