Edit: With over 1900 plays Iridescent is the most listened song in my music libary. @Abel You speak from my heart , bro.
Irridescent is one of, if not my least favorite song out of Linkin Park entire discography, and really a track that brings down ATS in my opinion. And yes, I'm not joking. The borderline naive lyrics are nothing compared to that cringeworthy, cliche, absolutely cheesy gang vocals bridge. Also, I don't like the melody of the chorus, how Chester sounds in that same chorus, the general arena ballady rock vibe, and the U2 copycat guitar starting at the beginning of second verse. The general association between the song and the transformers thing is another negative point. To be fair, I can dig the first verse of the track, but that's about it.
With Linkin Park's anger and frustration in check, A Thousand Suns resides back into the calming cosmic void as it enters the final curtain call. Iridescent is huge arena power ballad designed to rebel against the apocalypse. Shinoda's desolate opening verses paint a horrifying picture of the end of the world and then Bennington returns for a breathtaking chorus. The song is so satisfying because of its slow burning nature. Layers and elements continue to be added as the song builds over time. However, Iridescent finally takes full flight during the electrifying bridge by Delson and the revelatory gang vocals. Suddenly the dark and desolate track is injected with a lightning strike of positivity. Bennington leads the band to the stunning conclusion as one of the most uplifting songs in Linkin Park's career fades out into an ominous silence.
Iridescent is amazing. Especially when you get to hear it from the instrumental side. There's so many subtle nuances that make the overall mood so powerful. The verses describe catastrophe, holding some of my favorite lyrics from Mike to date, "And with the cataclysm raining down/ Insides crying, 'Save me now'", and the entirety of the second verse. Chester's verse is more uplifting, saying "Let it go" in spite of the devastation Mike has described. It's one of the more positive messages LP has conveyed. Of course, it gets even more powerful during the bridge. And then Brad, Mike, and Chester all play guitar for the finale, for an awesome closing. While not one of my favorites overall, Iridescent is up there on my top ten for post-MTM songs.
Iridescent is one of my favorite Linkin Park songs, probably my favorite ballad. It works great on its own and as a part of ATS when things can suddenly be looking up until the climax with The Catalyst. The piano line and atmosphere is just amazing and Mike's verses are great with it. Then Chester comes into it and continues it. I don't hear any bass melodies though, no matter how much you exaggerate them. Lyrics are very good too. The guitar break is one of the best points on ATS too. Then GANG VOCALS. Wonderful moment. I had not even heard the full version until the end credits of Transformers and it blew me away to hear Phoenix and Brad in it. Rob's drumming after the break is awesome too. It was defintiely a good match for Transformers because they weren't asked to write another song for it and this available one was a great fit. The scene in the movie where there is so much destruction matches up perfectly with it. The single mix is just for radio and the movie and honestly, the studio version is miles ahead of it. The music video is pretty good too and they had fun making it. The splices of Transformers into it is interesting. But Steve Jablonsky in that clip said that he was a fan before Transformers, and yet he didn't go to them for the latest movie. Dick. Live, it's still phenomenal. The only thing is that the gang vocals usually aren't strong enough and it's usually just Mike and Phoenix. Rob should wear a headset for it, that would add something great. Chester and Mike do very good harmonies too. The SOTS video is a nice change in it and it has a really good purpose. In that making of-LPTV when Brad suggests different people singing each chorus, you can just see the look in his eyes -"C'mon Mike I don't even play guitar anymore, let me have this one thing." Also, the name Iridescent was originally the name of another demo from the sessions, but they liked the name and used it for this song and made it "Iridescent New".
Weird how somebody should think that. This is my favourite soft song that Linkin Park have done before. I love what they did with it live. It just shows me how soft the song actually is, how the drums aren't that powerful, and how they both sing with so much compassion and beautifulness that no other band can create. See guys. Mike can sing live. So people who say he can't sing live, shaadup and listen to every song live apart from Rebellion where Mike sings.
Sadly that his main singing parts are in the normal version. The medey thing is just the gang vocals + Chester. (which isnt even bad, its great thought). If i remember it right , Mike was quite good 2010 performing this song
In the month since I joined here, I've learned that this place is full of people who don't realize that opinion =/= fact. I'm just gonna leave it here.
I haven't been able to write much considering how busy I've been recently, but as far as "Wisdom, Justice and Love," and "Iridescent" are concerned, both are great pieces of work. I don't think I've ever really been able to fall too much in love with "Iridescent," largely because I think Chester's portion of the song enters in too strong and is honestly a bit too cheesy for my taste. In fairness, I do think it is a great chorus and it has a lot of meaning, but there's just something about the "Do you feel cold and lost in desperation?" line that has always bothered me. I really do love Mike's verses, however - some of the best lyrics on the record. The imagery is excellent, and really goes well with the themes of the album. I also think Rob's drumming on "Iridescent" is great.
YES. Especially during the entirety of the gang vocals/last chorus part. That was some of the best drumming Rob's ever done.
I remember hearing "Iridescent" live for the first time. I'd looked forward to singing along to the gang vocal bridge, and I distinctly remember Bourdon's toms just ringing out so loudly
My pun actually made sense dammit, don't extend it. The post on The Catalyst is the light that ain't never comin'.
But we've already gone past that Well, I do have a list of songs that Mike sung well in live: 1: In Between 2: Burning In The Skies 3: Blackout 4: Iridescent 5: The Catalyst 6: In My Remains 7: Castle Of Glass 8: Victimised (intro) That's pretty much all of the songs he sung live, apart from Rebellion of course.
"Fallout" is the thirteenth track on A Thousand Suns, and the album's final, sixth interlude. It segues in directly from "Iridescent" and leads right into the anthemic lead single "The Catalyst". The lyrics of the song are the taken from the third song on the album, "Burning In The Skies". The track has Mike Shinoda singing, using auto-tune and pitch shifting effects to make his voice sound robotic. Towards the end of the track, his actual voice begins to appear, providing an interesting contrast to the previous interlude on the album, "Wisdom, Justice and Love", which does the opposite. It's almost like the return of humanity, after which the battle between our humanity and technology begins on "The Catalyst". The instrumental of the song is not a particularly exciting piece of audio to listen to, being composed out of mainly dark, brooding synths and a few bass drops. Don't get me wrong though - it provides an incredibly dark, movie score-like feel. Fun fact, in the booklet for A Thousand Suns, the lyrics to "Fallout" are wrong. They contain the first chorus of "Burning In The Skies", so they say "it's in the blackened bones", instead of "the blame is mine alone". And it leads right into... "The Catalyst" is the fourteenth track on A Thousand Suns, and it was used as the lead single from the album. Running for over 5 minutes, it is an upbeat, electronically driven banger with a synth solo in the middle, and layers upon layers of various electronic elements. It was the bands longest lead single until "Guilty All The Same" premiered in 2014. I guess I should mention that the version in the video is the shortened radio edit, which loses an entire minute of the song.On July 9, 2010, the band announced a new contest - "Linkin Park Featuring YOU", which allowed fans to download stems from "The Catalyst" from MySpace (loool), and make their own song without hearing the original first. It was first partially released as part of the Medal of Honor x Linkin Park "The Catalyst" trailer, which I'll talk about more later. The song premiered on August 2, 2010 on Zane Lowe's radio show segment entitled The Hottest Record in the World Today, after which Zane had an interview with Chester, which you can hear here. The band tried out several song titles for the song, such as "Violent Lullaby", "Hopeless Lullaby" and "Pagan Lullaby", before deciding to go with "The Catalyst". In chemical reactions, the catalyst is the substance that increases the rate of the reaction, just like the song is the fastest, fiercest on the album, and it really gets things going, even though the album is nearing the end. It feels like a final battle. The song recieved generally positive reviews from the fans, but the fans were split. It peaked on #27 on Billboard's Hot 100 chart, and was the first song in the history of the Rock Songs chart to debut at the top spot. Phoenix spoke on the song with MTV, particularly explaining why the band chose the song as the lead single, saying: "The Catalyst" begins with slow, dark synths, soon accompanied by loud sampled drums from Bourdon and a stellar scratching line from Joe Hahn. Mike soon kicks in with the first, heavily effected verse which has quite a nice echo effect on it. He's joined by Phoenix on possibly the loudest bassline of his career. The enitre band joins Mike to say "no!", before Chester joins Mike with singing as the two of them switch before the song really kicks in with it's signature synths and loud kick and snare drums. The second "verse", if you can call it that, is powerful and chaotic. A silent but deadly guitar riff from Delson (or more likely Shinoda) appears, as the agressiveness of the song increases. The synth solo is the key moment of the song and it's nothing short of breathtaking. The walls of synths, bass, guitars, drums, scratches... it adds up to one of the most powerful Linkin Park songs ever. And then - silent, dark piano line and a washed out synth as Shinoda and Bennington begins the unforgettable "lift me up/let me go" part of the song, accompanied by loud drums from Rob Bourdon as the song reaches it's climax. The finale is just... too damn great to explain. The song completely explodes in the most Linkin Park way you could ever imagine. The ending of the song has over 6 vocal tracks going off at the same time. The track, once again, ends on a sorrowful, dark note, with the piano + synth combo I mentioned before. Speaking about the writing process of the song, Phoenix said: Lyrically, the song has multiple meanings which are all nicely tied in together. The first important thing to note in the song are religious references, as the band calls out "God" several times, something they rarely did through their career. Despite what people thought at the time of the song's release - no, the band did not become born again Christians during the process of making the album. The second important element to the song are some of the most straightforward references to nuclear wars on the entire album. The track deals with the sins we've commited against ourselves, mostly centering on the invention of the atomic bomb, which is a running theme through the entire album. It's certainly one of the band's best works lyrically, and has some amazing quotes. "When I close my eyes tonight/to symphonies of blinding light" is most likely referring to a person who closes their eyes to shield their vision at the time of a bomb going off. Another favorite of mine is "where oceans bleed into the sky", which could refer to seas literally evaporating at the end of the world, or a metaphor for the end. "Lift me up/let me go" is most likely a prayer (nicely complements to "close my eyes tonight") or a way to beg the leaders of our countries to end the wars, and not blow each other up. Fun fact, the band didn't include the words "a thousand suns" into the song because they were the album title. They came up with the line "let them burn inside the fires of a thousand suns" (which was altered a bit later), and after googling the line found various appearances of the words that eventually became the album title. Parts of lyrics from the song were used in "The Requiem" and "Jornada del Muerto", while in the latter they were translated into Japanese. Two LPTV episodes were dedicated to the making of the song, both of which I embedded above. The first one documents Chester recording vocals for the song in Mike's LA home studio. Perhaps the best thing about the episode is the repetition of the word "fuck", and we find out Chester's true passion is nothing else but fucking. Sorry, forgot to say spoiler alert. The second one documents Mike and Chester coming up with lyrics for the song, aswell as deciding on the song title aswell. They went through three potential song titles, "Violent Lullaby", "Hopeless Lullaby" and "Pagan Lullaby", before almost settling with far and away the most creative, and most imaginative song title ever - "Chester's Lullaby". Also, "poop out" is a synonym for "fade". Who knew. A music video for the song was directed by Joe Hahn. The video is one of the bands most abstract and chaotic videos, relying on heavy use of smoke and occasional glitch effects. But it's useless for me to try to explain the video. I'll just post the text from the large board that explained the video on set. Not everything can be transcribed, but here it goes. On the other hand, Mike Shinoda had his own explanation of the video. A particularly fun element of the video is when the band throws colored powder at each other. Joe Hahn spoke on the inspiration for this, saying: Not a particularly fun experience for Mike and Chester who were singing while this was going on. The second day of the filming had Chester in a small pool, drowning and singing. Why? All in all, a pretty fun video. But it wasn't the only video shot for the song. The song had premiered as part of a Medal of Honor trailer, for which Joe Hahn directed a totally new video. Why? Well, I got Phoenix here to tell you. The video contains footage from the game aswell as live action footage filmed in a small village in Afghanistan. The actors in the video are the actors that the characters in the game were modelled after. You can watch the making of the video aswell, embedded above. It's honestly not a mindblowing experience, but... it's a part of song history so I mentioned it. Remember the "Linkin Park Featuring YOU" contest I mentioned earlier? The winner was Czeslaw 'NoBraiN' Sakowski from Ĺwidnica, Poland. Czeslaw got a few video chats with the band and got to meet them aswell, in addition to working on the outro to "When They Come For Me". His remix was avaliable on the BestBuy edition of the album. The remix is weird to say the least. He combined the stems from the track with his own work effortlessly, turning the banging electronic power ballad into an even more synthy, emotional experience. His first video chat with Mike was documented in an LPTV episode embedded above. And no one else but the Linkin Park Association we're on right now managed to get an interview with Czeslaw, which can be read here. Speaking about his decision to enter the contest, Czeslaw said: The top 20 remixes that were selected by the band were considered for future use as b-sides and online downloads, as seen in the "Linkin Park, featuring YOU Winner" episode of the band's LPTV series. Two of the remixes (by DIGITALOMAT and ill Audio) have since been released as via the band's webpage as free mp3 downloads, while two others (by Cale Pellick and DJ Endorphin) have been released via the iTunes EP version, released exclusively in Europe. "Fallout" and "The Catalyst" were monsters when performed live. "Fallout" had it's debut live performance on the release day of the album, on September 14, 2010. Through the entirety of the A Thousand Suns touring cycle, it was played as an introduction to "The Catalyst". It had it's final live performance on September 25, 2011 at the final gig of the cycle in Singapore. "The Catalyst" had it's debut live performance a week earlier on September 7, 2010. Through the rest of the cycle, the band performed the song in it's original album form. Regardless of this, it was mindblowing. Above is embedded one of my favorite performances, from the bands June 23, 2011 show in Moscow for the Transformers 3 premiere. Mike and Chester both acknowledged that the song is one of the hardest for them to perform, as their voices are completely blown out after the song from the continuous yelling. Even from Mike. The band continued to play the song during both Living Things and The Hunting Party touring cycles, however, in the latter, not in it's album form. The band used it as part of the Mashup Intro which began the songs, and the song was tied together with "Session", "1stp Klosr", "The Requiem", "The Summoning" and "Guilty All The Same". At the end of the show, during "Bleed It Out", the band would typically play a refrain from the song over the riff, thus we can say they both opened and closed the shows with the song. Kind of. Also, I guess this is something I should mention, something that went fairly obscure nowadays. Pendulum performed a cover/remix of "The Catalyst" in BBC Radio 1's Live Lounge on September 22, 2010. They turned the song to quite an agressive, DnB & Dubstep influenced anthem that's just bound to get stuck in your head after you listen to it. Listen below. (this is way better than I remember it being) We'll switch to a new schedule now that I'm done with school - new post up every three days. No more "I didn't have time". Write fuckers, write. And to thank the true hero who brought you this post: THANK YOU, TIM! Also, here's Zak's good, yet poorly mixed new remix of the song. Just 'cause I'm nice like that. [/QUOTE]