Individual songs like "Bleed It Out," "The Little Things Give You Away," and b-side "No Roads Left" stand out in terms of successfully moving away from previous templates while retaining the confidence of HT and Meteora. But what's on the album is too tentative, too scattershot. Honorable mostly as a stepping-stone to the more coherent and intriguing A Thousand Suns, Minutes to Midnight is like listening to a band jam its way through multiple-personality-disorder.
i liked M2M but i didnt think it was the best. ATS in my opinion was more professional, more of a theme and more epic. what i really cant wait for is the era of living things
I think it was Live wise. The show never lost energy at ALL. Maybe for In Between or something but it was just spectacular. Loved every minute of it. My favorite era is 2001-2004.
I still give Minutes a good amount of air time. For me, its highlights were the raw, heavy songs. The thundering drums on No More Sorrow tingles my spine every time I hear it still. As does that brutal 17 seconds of rage from Chester in Given Up. Given Up felt like an organic upgrade of some of their earlier stuff (minus rapping). Just fuckin cool. The albums downfalls though, were not any songs in particular, but more so how it jumped from heavy to soft, like they were unsure how to go about arranging it. It was a very broad range of styles too, which left people that may not like a certain style, unhappy with a few songs but happy with others, which I guess make it seem inconsistent. Although I'm a fan of plenty of mellow stuff from Jack Johnson through to Snow Patrol, it is the heavy songs of LP that will always be their cornerstone for me. With that said, Shadow of The Day is in my top 5 favourite songs. I guess Minutes opened many fan's eyes to a wider variety of music, including myself. it was a step they needed to take in order to fill "The Toolbox" lol.
Minutes to Midnight is a good album. Just not very amazing. Most of the music there sounded familiar, but it still helped out in changing LP's sound. Rick Rubin helped them successfully change from metal to somewhat-emo. This is a good review for M2M: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/albumreviews/minutes-to-midnight-20070530?stop_mobi=yes
I somewhat agree and disagree on this. I'm ok with the fact LOATR lyrics are far superior to those in Qwerty, but that's pretty much the only positive point I can see in LOATR. Honestly, the guitar in LOATR is just weak. Same super simple octaves part the whole song + generic powerchords at their finest on the last chorus. Pick a guitar, and play LOATR. Then, play Qwerty. You'll see what I mean And the fact the bridge is repeated at the end of the song doesn't make it more creative imo. It's not a new part, it's just the same thing put on another place in the song And finally, I don't think Qwerty sounds like something on Meteora. It's much more heavy and raw than all you can find on that record.
But the simplicity in LOATR isn't for specifically technical reasons. It's entirely for texture. They're using the guitar in that song as a synth pad more than a lead part.
MTM was okay for me. The only songs I really care for are Little Things Give You Away and HHH, although I'll give the whole album a spin from time to time. ATS is definetely my favourite era, MTM second, HT and Meteora last.
Well, since lot of people seems to like this song a lot, I just listened to it again, trying to understand the reason of that praise. And sorry, but for me, the guitar still kills it. I'm not against simplicity and against the fact of using simple guitar parts for texture. The problem is, in this case, I think they should have lowered it down a lot. For a textural element, it's way too loud and prominent, which makes me pay a lot of attention to it, and going " When the ¨*ck will there be a change in that freaking guitar part?!". I would probably like the song better if the atmospherical elements in the song were louder and the guitar lower. While listening to the song, I also remembered I can't stand the multi-layered vocals on the chorus. A more raw sound would have been welcome to me.
I support you showing your opinion, but I disagree strongly with you. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Linkin Park was pop, we know your theory.
Well MTM is my favourite LP album, I love everything about it(except the lyrics of Given Up) but it clearly wasn't the best era of the band. ATS era was the best.
Minus atleast gets that you dont need an obscene amount of complex song structure and "hot licks" if the song and the band does not call for it. Maybe if people focused less on the guitar or single instruments and started looking at the songs in general, in a broader concept, they would understand what Minus and myself do.