Minutes To Midnight (Parental Advisory) [PA] - Linkin Park > Reviews > Minutes to Midnight

Author's product rating:   

Originality	Completely unoriginal
Lyrics	Dire
Quality and consistency of tracks	Consistently bad
How does it compare to the artist's other releases	Unmemorable
Value for Money	Very Poor

Advantages:	It makes you appreciate the old Linkin Park
Disadvantages:	The old Linkin Park is gone

Recommend to potential buyers:

no

Full review

It was on a gloomy Sunday evening at a private party where I first heard Linkin Park's new album. I won't waste your time as Minutes to Midnight did mine. I hope this opening paragraph sums up my thoughts nicely - Half way through, I stood up from the poker table and yanked the disc out of the player before sitting back down listening to a free Sunday Mirror CD. It was the first thing I could get my hands to, The Very Best Christmas Hits. I assume you realise it was 27 May.

Let me make this clear, I don't like bands who drift between genres. It reeks of selling out, moving from what was popular to what is. A band like Linkin Park attracted a loyal fan-base by experimenting aside from the norm and sticking to what they believed was good music. Apparently we are to forget these times as the band turns in the opposite direction and join the masses in a terrible attempt at soft pop rock.

On the Monday I listened to the album through. I don't know where to begin. There's so much wrong, it truly is heart-breaking. The most apparent fault upon hearing it for the first time is the complete lack of hip-hop. That special element which took our breath away over half a decade ago is gone. We hear nothing reminiscent of "In The End" or "Crawling" on this album. Instead we hear a new Mike Shinoda, a singing Mike Shinoda, accompanied by dreadfully panned guitars rendering you dizzy.

What else is immediately apparent is profanity. I'll be the first to say an intelligently placed swear word can work wonders for a song, but this simply isn't the case on Minutes to Midnight. On one of the first tracks, Given Up, we hear the chorus "tell me what the fuck is wrong with me". Linkin Park have never used vulgarity in their past releases bar a collaboration with Jay-Z on Collision Course. Coming to the realisation that they've ruined a brilliant modern metal achievement for the sake of shock tactics is just cringe worthy.

As you plod your way through the tracks you realise there's literally nothing impressive about them. This is the sort of stuff you fall asleep to. It's ambient, at times coming over all country & western. As you sit there embarrassed, you can't help but think this is something extremely undesirable from a distortion prone band having held the UK albums #1 chart spot five times out of a possible seven.

There's little else to say other than everything about this album is wrong. Linkin Park should never have tried to fix what wasn't broke. Long-term fans will not appreciate this mess of a tangent, but will continue to appreciate a catalogue of past releases. Six little known Linkin Park Underground albums, available from the band's official fan club, are much more deserving of the promotion platform given to Minutes to Midnight.

In conclusion I will not let this album tarnish my memory of Linkin Park and neither should you. I still have four LP albums playing regularly on my iPod. In fact, as I wrote this review, I've listened to, and greatly enjoyed, Live in Texas.

Anybody who is a fan of the Hybrid Theory era will not make it to the end of this album without wanting to shoot themselves or their CD player. I'm so disappointed in Linkin Park. I expected more, much more, from a band who wrote the soundtrack to my teenage years.

I'm afraid I can't justify recommending this album to anyone, let alone Linkin Park fans, and for such I'm giving Minutes to Midnight a generous 0/10. Avoid at all costs.