Minutes To Midnight (Parental Advisory) [PA] - Linkin Park > Reviews > Poop in the Park

Author's product rating:   

Originality	Lacking inspiration
Lyrics	Dire
Quality and consistency of tracks	One hit and lots of B-sides
How does it compare to the artist's other releases	Unmemorable
Value for Money	Poor

Advantages:	Not as bad as My Chemical Romance
Disadvantages:	But not much better either .

Recommend to potential buyers:

no

Full review

I could go and write a totally in depth review on Linkin Park's latest effort, but I'm going to give it to you straight.

I'm dissapointed. How many years, 3 or 4?? since they released Meteora, which I enjoyed, yes, it was total nu metal pop, and it didn't do anything different than Hybrid Theory, but it was catchy, and the songs were just plain good. Yeah, all kinda wore off quickly, but that's pop music isn't it?

Anyway, LP have kinda abandoned the well produced nu metal of their older releases and made some kind of watered down angry kid music, somewhere between pop punk, stadium rock and... I don't know!

It doesn't really feel like this album had any direction, just a mish-mash of random songs that sound half finished. A number of the songs stop really suddenly as well, a touch I don't think is a good one. The rather enjoyable rapping of the earlier releases has largly been taken away which is kinda stupid, and has been replaced with more vocals. The funny thing is that Mike Shinodas rapping ability has improved on this album(there is not a lot of rapping) and Beddington's singing ability has descreased, it sounds really terrible. He sounds like a child on the last song it's really weird and wrong. They seem to have become cocky bastards. The lyrics are really bad as well. Nothing new, lines about "taking everything away" and all that old stuff which sounds like it's been made up on the spot. These kind of lyrics are all over todays emo-numetal-metalcore world of music and it used to be kinda cool, but now it;s overused. I want new lyrical ideas.

Maybe they are trying to throw away the old "commercialised nu metal" label but I think they are just pandeirng to a totally new ideology with their just so fashion, the anti bush message and all new rebelliousness for no reason. The album is under produced it has no depth.

With the exceptions of a few songs, like "bleed it out" and the single "What Iv'e Done"(grows on me) this album is really underwhelming, I'm not impressed, and for a band that have multi millions they should have had a MUCH better album produced here.