I'll tweak my opinion a bit and say the ATS era. The best tour ever, the fan interaction and the pre-album puzzles. All the flame wars. The excitement when 'The Catalyst' was released. Nothing can match all that.
I like 3 eras for different reasons - pre-HT: i love the diversity in the really early stuff, they seemed way more adventurous at this point than what ended up on HT. MTM: for getting me into LP. RTR is still one of my favourite live DVDs from any band. ATS: for the art, and being the first LP album I was really around to see all the hype.
All of it. I got into them in about 2002, but as soon as I could I scoured the internet for every demo and unreleased track I could find. When I have a lot of stuff to do around the house, I like putting on a playlist from 1996 to present and just listen to them evolve all day.
The ATS cycle was great as well. Great shows, huge album hype. When they finally released the catalyst it was pretty mind blowing.
ATS cycle was my favorite tour era, but like is stated earlier the graffiti art getup from meteora was my favorite in that perspective.
Honestly the LT cycle has been the first boring one for me. I just feel like they can do better on all fronts. Not just the music.
My favorite album was Hybrid Theory, but I finally came into realization that LP would become my favorite band during Meteora. I remember like it was yesterday: I was visiting my local zoo (rightfully called Lincoln Park Zoo) and my buddy points to me and asked if I ever heard the band called Linkin Park. Intrigued, I listened to them and loved them. Being a kid with a short attention span, I never heard them again until they collaborated with Jay-Z. Numb/Encore was the unofficial song in my school and that is when I picked up my first LP CD. I ran to the store and tried going about buying everything LP related, but everything was sold out, so I ended up picking up Live In Texas (which is still the best live album). This is where I discovered their previous songs and everything above. It was some good times. Especially sharing the new found glory with a bunch of my friends who are into Rap/Hip-Hop, enjoyed some great memories with them towards my journey of becoming a Linkin Park fan.
That's funny you mention your first linkin park album was live in Texas. When I first went to the record store to buy some LP stuff the only album that wasn't sold out at the time was live in Texas as well. This was back in 2004, So I bought it and have been rockin it ever since.
A lot of people hate on Live In Texas but it's definitely one of my favorite LP live releases ever. I bought it way back when it came out in 2003 and back then, it was like heaven because of all the low quality live shit we had back then.
Agreed. However, it is certainly one hell of a calm. Their accolades speak for themselves, and they're garnering success regardless of whether or not they're pushing their new material. Pretty rad.
Really??? I love their performance for: P5hng Me A*WY, Figure. 09, With You, By Myself, Crawling, A Place for My Head, and One Step Closer, with the extra Reanimation Bridge.
It's no surprise that I would say all of them as my answer. I love the Hybrid Theory days because that's when I first heard One Step Closer on the radio which introduced me to an album that would both change and save my life. I love Reanimation because it proved something that I already knew; Linkin Park was a band that approached music from a different way and defied the way that remix albums were thought about. It was extremely ballsy to follow up a debut album with a remix album. The radio stations had a lot of hassle by me when it came out with one DJ going as far to say that "This band must be full of themselves to release a remix of their first CD... Either that or they are looking to piggy-back the success of how well that record did." Yeah, fuck you too, radio. By the time Meteora came out, I was in College and that album made me persue some courses in art appreciation. I loved the artwork of the album and the music was playing non-stop. Albeit is a HT part 2, I still enjoy(ed) the hell out of it. Next came Live In Texas. I love this "era" because it took me another step into the Linkin Park fandom realm. I remember going to the regal theater, which was like an hour away, to watch the premier of LIT on the movie screen. I met up with some friends who I met from the LPU and as chance would have it, they were able to get me into the LPST. My first official run of promoting one of the band's projects came with the release of Collision Course. Although CC was shunned by a lot of people, I was excited and thrilled to hear their songs in a new light. The mash-ups gave a new take on old favorites and it was a really cool EP to listen to. Fort Minor came along and it was really cool to see a whole "Mike: Unleashed" album. I was also helping out with the promoting of The Rising Tied, which was so awesome for me. Knowing that there wasn't going to me much rapping on the next release from Linkin Park, I sucked up everything that I could out of Fort Minor, including being one of the first 500 members in the short lived Fort Minor Militia. Enter Minutes To Midnight. The one album that shocked the hell out of many of the fans and strained allegiances to the band. I remember being on the fence with Minutes when it first came out and being very unsure about it. I blame that entirely on the release of QWERTY. I read an interview with Mike saying that there wasn't much rap on the new album. QWERTY was released right before MTM and that gave me hope that the interview was wrong and that the entire CD was going to be quite like QWERTY. I was wrong. I eventually got over it and embraced the album, as opposed to keeping it at arms length. I think what I like most about it was how many of the earlier fans outcasted it. Again, my assumption of the band being different was ever apparent. Next, the band released the Road To Revolution DVD/CD. Although the Milton Keynes show didn't bring anything new, it was cool to see/hear the band play some newer songs. Dead By Sunrise came out next and it was cool to see another side of Chester. The moody tone of Out of Ashes was distinctly different from anything Linkin Park has done. It was also very cool to see some influences of 80's style pop shine through on that album. A Thousand Suns. This is one of those albums where every time I hear it, I find another reason to love it. I was on the LPMB and LPUMB during the release of ATS and I was also following the decoding that was happening here on the LPA. Those were some good times on this site. Being sick of everyone's negativity towards LP's creativity on the new album, I came here to the LPA shortly after I went to the Summit in Chicago. It was quite refreshing to find fans, like me, that wanted intelligent and enlightening conversation regarding A Thousand Suns. I'll admit it. When ATS first came out, I was shocked. I wasn't really sure that I liked it. I then gave it another listen and found something I liked. Then another thing. Then another, etc... It wasn't long after that ATS was playing constantly on repeat on my Ipod. I stopped listening to the radio after The Catalyst debuted on the morning show that the alternative radio station here had on. The two DJs that ran the radio show tore the song to pieces and if you called in with a differing opinion, you were belittled on air and pretty much bullied by them and other callers. Such horseshit. Anyways, during the ATS cycle, I got to meet many new friends here in the LPA and that to me is very special. With the Living Things cycle, it was cool to see the band release songs that were drawing influences from every era of their music. Being a follow up to ATS, I knew ahead of time that we weren't going to get another ATS. I knew that the album was going to be a step away from it, and that's what I felt. It was definitely a natural progression away from ATS. None-the-less, I still love it. I'm definitely looking forward to what the future holds for Linkin Park. I've stopped "expecting" things out of the band. I have enough trust in them to make music and art that I will love. Here's to the future.