What the...???

Almost everyone agrees that change, used in the correct proportions, is almost always a good thing. However, everyone also agrees that change is NOT always good.

Linkin Park should have learned that by now...

With 2003's Meteora, Linkin Park was officially a jauggernaut in the music world. Meteora was as close to musical perfection as can be accomplished, with 4 huge hits and a remainder of songs that could have served as singles on their on accord. Every Linkin Park fan was eagerly awaiting their next CD, wondering what the nu-metal pioneers could come up with next. When word of a new album surfaces, news that came as a shock to me as well as many others accompanied it; LP announced that the "nu-metal" sound was totally gone. My first thought was "what the hell are they thinking?" It is totally moronic to abandon the very sound that has gotten them famous in the first place.

So I thought maybe they were just joking around and were actually working on a great hard rock album. My God how wrong I was...

Their new CD, Minutes to Midnight, is a perfect example of a once powerful and compelling band going to hell in a handbasket. No nu-metal sound? I could play a tune on my guitar that sounds better than this album, and I suck at playing guitar!!! Besides the fact that there is hardly any rock sound here at all, LP also somewhere got the great idea to become the next ultra-political- emo rockers, ala System of a Down and Disturbed. Even I have to hand it to those bands though, because they actually kept their balls on and continued to rock hard while delivering their political messages.

There are so many things wrong with this CD it isn't funny. Mike Shinoda? My God, that poor guy almost never gets a chance to even open his mouth on this album. He leads the vocals in ONE, that's right, ONE song. He has small parts in other songs, but it is absolutely nothing compared to the first two albums. It's pretty dang bad that the man who sings on pretty much all of Linkin Park's greatest hits hardly gets a chance on this album. No wonder he started up Fort Minor. Instead, the 15-year old mental mentality of Chester Bennington reigns supreme on this album, which is far from being a good thing. "PUT ME OUT OF MY F***ING MISERY!!!" screams Bennington on the very adult-language theme song that is "Given Up." As I sit here listening to the song...I would bet that some would like to actually put him out of his misery, because this album sounds like the entire band is in misery. At points on the album, it actually sounds like the Fallout Boy or 30 Seconds to Mars veil will be ripped away and the Linkin Park sound we all know and love will come roaring forth. Sadly, this never happens.

To make matters worse, as mentioned in the above paragraph, the new cd comes with a nice shiny PARENTAL ADVISORY sticker slapped on it. Apparently they hung out with Jay-Z way too much and the rap lyrics rubbed off on them, because there are many F bombs scattered throughout this CD. Places in songs where F words don't even really fit in, yet they are there.

This CD is unspeakably awful, yet somehow CD sales are going strong for this album somehow. In the meantime, the true Linkin Park fans are ripping the new CD to shreds on the comments section of LP's Myspace site. Many fans are really not happy with the direction that the band has chosen to go down, and you can count me as one of them.