Linkin Park - Minutes To Midnight Review
Posted by Brandon Ratliff on 05.15.2007
I'm going to go ahead and say it...this album sucks. Go ahead and get the hate mail ready.
Linkin Park – Minutes To Midnight
Release Date: May 15, 2007
Label: Warner Bros. Records
Produced By: Rick Rubin
First Single: What I’ve Done
Recommended Downloads: No More Sorrow, What I’ve Done, Bleed It Out
Linkin Park is:
Vocals: Chester Bennington
Vocals/Guitar: Mike Shinoda
Guitar: Brad Delson
Bass: Phoenix
Drums: Rob Bourdon
Samples: Joe Hahn
Tracklisting
1. Wake
2. Given Up
3. Leave Out All The Rest
4. Bleed It Out
5. Shadow Of The Day
6. What I’ve Done
7. Hands Held High
8. No More Sorrow
9. Valentine’s Day
10. In Between
11. In Pieces
12. The Little Things Give You Away
Four years. It’s been over four years since the March 25, 2003 release of Meteora, Linkin Park’s last studio album. There has been quite a bit that has happened in the long time period between albums, including a mash-up album with Jay-Z, a label dispute that came quite close to getting the band removed from Warner Brothers Records (in which case one can’t help but to wonder if that was a tactic to get a new contract offering the band more money), the Mike Shinoda “Fort Minor” solo album, the Chester Bennington solo album…
Wait, has that last one happened yet? Maybe so…maybe it happened on May 15, 2007.
Probably the first thing I did after listening through Minutes To Midnight the first time through was stop, scratch my head a bit, and say “is this really a Linkin Park album?” See, the thing with this album is that it really is not a bad album. It really isn’t. But, it is, however, a bad Linkin Park album. One thing that you have heard me say time and time again over the three years that I’ve written for this website is that I will welcome change with open arms, but a band can not expect to completely change their style to the point where it sounds nothing like the same band and expect to get away with it. Well, it works for some bands, but it usually is a gradual change, where each subsequent album moves more in the direction that the band is intending to go. Look at Powerman 5000. Love them or hate them, they have not had two albums that sounded alike (unless you count 2001’s Anyone For Doomsday?, which was shelved for that very reason) over the course of their five releases. However, each disc was not so different that they completely forgot about their fans and thus, were able to keep their core fan base (though many defected as the nu-metal scene died out) through all of those releases.
And that, folks, is the problem here. This is a passage taken from one of the reviews of Meteora right here on 411Mania:
I find it impossible for any band that has such a huge debut to possibly be able to follow up to everyone’s expectations. There is always something that will seem out of place with a second album, just because you’ve grown so familiar to the debut and simply don’t know any different. Meteora’s strengths is that it doesn’t stray too far from the original formula that made LP so popular to begin with. Having said that, when they try and do something completely out of musical character, it falls completely flat – hurting the overall album in the process.
Read that last line: “Having said that, when they try and do something completely out of musical character, it falls completely flat – hurting the overall album in the process."
My friends, welcome to Minutes To Midnight.
See, as I was saying earlier, the thing here isn’t that this is a bad album because it’s really not. It is, however, a bad Linkin Park album. And before you open up your email account and write me a scathing letter saying I’m stupid and just wanted Hybrid Theory part three, read the beginning of this again. Change and evolution in sound and feeling is something a band must go through if they wish to continue to grow as musicians and as people. But the problem here is this seems like, well, a Chester Bennington solo album. Mike Shinoda makes three vocal appearances out of the eleven songs, and only one of those are in the traditional Linkin Park style of he and Bennington trading off on vocals. “Bleed It Out” features Shinoda rapping the verses, then giving the vocals to Bennington with a chant of “bring that chorus in!” at the end of each one. The song has kind of an interesting effects loop on it as it is meant to sound like it is being played in a live setting with a crowd clapping along and various yelling and whooping going on. I’ll admit that hearing it the first time I thought it was kind of cheesy to use this loop, but after hearing it a few times, you will come to realize that it actually adds quite a bit to the song, and is the only time on the album where the clap rhythm isn’t horribly placed.
One place that it is horribly placed, however, is in the album opener “Given Up.” This track is somewhat in the vein of the heavier, guitar driven tracks from Meteora, most notably “Don’t Stay.” Instead of starting out with a rhythmic symbol clash or something along those lines, the song kicks off with a fast paced clap. Okay, it’s kind of cheesy, but it would work if they cut it once the song got started. Do they? No. Instead, they have it randomly come back at odd parts of the verse and chorus, making it sound very awkward. But even this is tolerable. Where it completely ruins the song is the bridge, where instead of letting the bass hold its own timing in the first line, they have the clapping going through the entire bridge, which just completely does not work with the very heavy riffing. This would have been a very good song without the clapping, and it would have been decent if they’d kept it minimal (read: out of the bridge COMPLETELY), but instead opted to stick with it. Didn’t the clapping thing go out in the 1980s anyways?
Wait, didn’t Bennington say his solo album would have a very eighties feel to it? Odd.
Next up is the musically weak “Leave Out All The Rest,” which sounds like a b-side that should have been kept to a chick flick soundtrack. The song is very catchy however, and could very easily end up as a very huge single. We’ve already covered the excellent “Bleed It Out,” so the next song after that is “Shadow Of The Day.” This song kind of reminds me of an eighties ballad, which could have found an easy home on David Bowie’s Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps). Bennington does not show much vocal range in the song, and the lyrics are sub par. The music is very generic and bland as well, which definitely does not help things.
“What I’ve Done” follows, and is the first single. The track features some of the album’s strongest lyrics, and it reminds me a lot of a more organic sounding “Numb.” The track is making very good waves at radio, and as it kind of sounds like older Linkin Park, it’s pretty easy to see why this was the first single. I think one of the two harder songs (yes, there are only two on the entire album) would have worked well also, but as it stands, this track was a good choice and is doing well. “Hands Held High” is the other song that Shinoda raps on, but he handles all of the vocals on this one. There’s not much in the way of instrumentals on this, with only drums and an effects loop playing throughout, but Shinoda carries the song pretty well by rapping the verses and singing the choruses along side of a vocal loop that repeats “Amen!” The vocal loop can kind of get irritating if you focus on it too much, and the song feels extremely short, but it’s a decent song overall, though it feels a little too much like a Fort Minor song as opposed to a Linkin Park track.
The crunchy “No More Sorrow” is next, and is probably the strongest track on the album that isn’t like an older Linkin Park song. The cadence-like drumming and guitar in the verse leads into the Trust Company-esque chorus quite well. The bridge is the highlight however, featuring easily the heaviest riff Linkin Park has ever released. I don’t think this would work very well as a single, but I can definitely see it becoming a fan favorite.
“Valentine’s Day” comes up next, and…
Wait, who is this? Linkin Park? Really? Again, this sounds like another solo Bennington song, though it would have worked much better as a Dashboard Confessional song. The song is very heartfelt, and the lyrics are very good, but the track overall is weak and just does not work as a Linkin Park song. It kills the semi-decent pace the album had going, and marks basically the end of any hope of this album actually being above average.
“In Between” was an admirable effort by Mike Shinoda to do an entire song actually singing by himself, but it sounds like another bad b-side, and the processing they did of his vocals absolutely killed any positive vibe the song had going for it. The parts where there are no effects added sound good as Shinoda has a good singing voice, but as soon as they start adding the chorus and pitch shifter (which is after the first verse of the rest of the song), it absolutely kills it. Mark another failed experiment.
The closing song “The Little Things Give You Away,” is one that has been talked about a lot of forums as it features a guitar solo by Brad Delson. Well, the song itself is fairly slow, and again sounds like just a Bennington solo fare, but this “guitar solo” by Delson turns out to be little more than him playing the very slow base melody to the song about four minutes in (the song is 6:26). Needless to say, it’s not much of a solo, as it is more of a lead melody line than a solo. The vocals in the song are, for the most part, very flat and boring as well, so the song does not do a good job to close the album.
This is just my opinion, but remember “Qwerty?” If you’ve heard it, you know it was a very metal song for Linkin Park, easily their heaviest ever (and it would beat out “No More Sorrow” without a doubt). I think they should have saved it and placed it as the closing track on the album, ending it on a very strong note. This would have allowed the album to end on a strong and memorable track, and likely would make the listener want to come back to it. But as it stands, “The Little Things Give You Away” ends the album on a slow and bland note, and I often found myself skipping it after the first couple of listens as it just seems to drag on forever, and never gets any more interesting no matter how many times you listen to it.
Overall, as I said many times before, this is a decent album as a whole, but lacks that certain special something that makes it great. But it honestly sounds way too much like a Chester Bennington solo album that features Mike Shinoda a couple of times rather than a Linkin Park album. There is no more DJ work by Joe Hahn here, but rather the overuse of annoying samples, and the excruciatingly bad clap rhythm effect that is only tolerable, much less good on “Bleed It Out.” Most of the tracks are bland and boring, with very little solid guitar work by Brad Delson, save for the two harder songs. “What I’ve Done” is probably the closest you’ll get to old Linkin Park here, but that still sounds way too different to be Linkin Park. Of course bands will sometimes try to experiment a little too much with their sound and find out how it doesn’t work (see also “Breaking The Habit” from Meteora, which despite how popular it got, was not a good song at all), but consider the situation here. It has been over four years since the band’s last album. Rick Rubin, who you know can make a good, heavy record produced it, and the band wrote somewhere in the area of one hundred songs for this record, which obviously included the phenomenal “Qwerty.” Who knows how many other great heavier songs they wrote as well.
Am I saying I wanted an album with nothing but Metalli-Park songs? No, because that’s not who they are. But as I said, considering the circumstances behind the writing and recording of Minutes To Midnight, Linkin Park has absolutely no excuse for this album being so weak. But will they take another four years until their next album? Well hopefully the bad taste this will likely leave in the collective mouths of their fans will get them to stay in gear and get something out much quicker next time, but if not, this is what we’re stuck with until 2011. So get used to it, or find someone else to listen to until then, because this album is not worth its weight in the plastic used to produce it. Linkin Park can do so much better. Let’s just hope they realize that next time.
The 411: One word to describe this album? Weak. Easily their worst album, the band tries to play with their sound too much. I can respect them trying to evolve and change, but this is not the way to do that. Sorry guys, but I really can’t recommend this album to anyone, unless you’re looking for something that is like Chester Bennington and some random band behind him. Because this is not Linkin Park. It’s…well, I don’t know what it is. But it is definitely not Linkin Park, and that’s what matters. Avoid this one, or download it if you must.
