The song structure in A Thousand Suns is hardly "experimental"

I guess we all agree that Youtube is the source of fair opinions.

 

This is a pretty fair review. The one thing I strongly agree with him on is how the A Thousand Suns completely fails as a concept album. It really is a mess in that area.

 

Imo he is too harsh on some songs, mainly Jornada Del Muerto and Wisdom, Justice, and Love. Those are great interludes that work very well with the album as a whole.

 

Why is that people always complain about the songs not being complex, or for having the same structure, and so on...?? Just relax and enjoy the fuckng music.

 

Yeah, he sounds like he actually gave the album a chance.
Most reviewers/comments on youtube aren't that reflected though

 

We're taking YouTube comments seriously now?

 

Tbh. Taking YouTube comments seriously in 2016......yikes

 

I still don't think giving it a chance makes it particularily valid. Look at the rest of the videos in that series. All heavier rock bands. ATS could have been as good as Kid A and that guy still would have hated it because of its genre. He doesn't even have the decency to say "I don't like it", he just says "this is bad and here's why". He doesn't even get particularily deep into analysis (edit: and some of his reasoning is soooo terrible :/), although I'll admit, he gets far, far deeper than the majority of music critics. It just seems silly to write a review in a genre you obviously don't enjoy. I'm not going to go out and write a review of a rap album, seeing as there're only about five rap albums I listen to.

 

I think it was the way the band were describing the album that threw everyone off. They made it seem like a really structureless and jammy album, which wasn't really the case. Maybe the demos were that way but the final songs were fairly standard in structure. I have no problem with that but clearly some people here do. The sound of the album was experimental but the structure wasn't. The only really weird song IMO is Blackout. Which is a weird song by any artist's standard - screaming and scatting demonically over club music.

 

This I totally agree with. I suppose the way the album was sold has to to be looked at in light of the fact that it's still a Linkin Park record. The album wasn't really a concept album and the structure was quite rigid, which is why I'm still a tiny bit surprised that the band haven't tried to push that aspect further. When ATS was released it seemed almost... obvious that the band would try to continue in that direction. Obviously now we know that their career took a different path, but considering just how much effort they put into completely de-Linkin Parkifying themselves (that's what they described it as in the making of, right?), LT and THP were certainly surprising. I actually don't mind, I actually love both albums, but I think that if you had asked any of us in 2010/2011 what the next album would sound like, especially considering the rhetoric the band were using all throughout the ATS cycle, I don't think many of us would have expected LT.

 

I also kept in mind that it is Linkin Park, so I wasn't expecting some King Crimson-type song writing. I maybe hoped they would go far left field, but kept those expectations down. The album is still my second favorite after THP. I just felt a little mislead when they kept referencing Pink Floyd, the Who and Radiohead. I know that is just a matter of how I interpreted their description though.

I was surprised by the sound of LT too, but then I remembered that they spend months promoting every album. And they probably wanted something more high energy for their next touring cycle after ATS. It's ok for the band to have an album for that, since they spend so much of their career touring.

 

Yeah I totally agree, it's just a bit funny that you could almost make the same argument for an album like Hybrid Theory or Meteora, where most of the songs deal with the same lyrical themes as well.

Yeah, while I think they did a great job of explaining ATS overall, I can imagine just how hard it must have been to even begin promoting it without overselling/underselling it. As for LT, I totally agree, the only think that annoyed me about the last two albums is that despite all the rhetoric about wanting lively music for their concerts, they only actually played half of each.

 

I think everyone in this thread is echoing this. I don't think anyone here has over the top expectations of the band, where they'll be disappointed if they don't deliver exactly what they want, it's more that many of us still hope that the band continue to push themselves as hard as they can creatively, as they have been doing for over a decade. I'd be more than happy if they kept knocking out albums as good as LT and THP, and I'm not setting my expectations higher than that: they're both great albums. But I still feel that it's fun to speculate on what I'd really love the band to do and see if others agree. Some do, some don't, and it's been really interesting to see other people's views and opinions. After all, that's why we're all here, right?

 

I watched that review when it came out. That guy always makes me laugh and it was no different on that one.

...that's because I didn't lose my shit when someone disagreed with me.

 

So much truth to this post, that I just quote it because I can