I was going back and forth about whether or not to buy this album, but after previewing all of the tracks I took a gamble. The last two albums, for me, have been a let down, and no, I’m not including the rap mix revision with Jay-Z which I did not touch with a barge pole. Despite one or two tracks that were great on Minutes to Midnight and A Thousand Suns, I found the rest to be a real let down or they made me grind my teeth.
Linkin Park’s first two albums were amazing. Every single song on Hybrid Theory is excellent. In particular the instrumental track, Cure for the Itch fascinates me and I’m still convinced the latter part would make an amazing theme tune for something like a remake of The Equalizer on TV, as it seems to perfectly capture the mood and darker aspects of that show. Some people claim that debut albums are the best and thereafter the music goes downhill as people ‘sell out’ or their egos get too big and they believe their own hype, or a billion other reasons for not getting more of the same the second time around. I’m not someone who believes or buys into that wobbly theory. Meteora, LP’s second album, proved that theory to be wholly untrue. Sure, it was different, but they’d grown up a bit, their style had evolved and there were some amazing mixes and blending of different sounds, styles and voices. Numb is still one of my favourite LP tracks and I don’t think there is a weak song on the album.
Enough dancing around. Living Things starts out very strongly and for the first half I was delighted to hear a mix of new and old. Some songs feature the familiar, with Chester and Mike doing their usual rap and shouty blend of musical mayhem that is one of their signatures. So maybe they didn’t invent it, but it’s a sound I associate primarily with them. There are even a couple of so
ngs where Chester’s voice is kept at an even 8 out of 10 on the Richter scale and he doesn’t shout once. You can hear him almost getting there at the start of I’ll Be Gone but he manages to hold back and the song is better for it. Castle of Glass that follows it is excellent and at this point I was feeling very happy with my purchase and for taking a risk.
So, imagine my surprise after two great, but more gentle tracks in a row than you might associate with the band, to have my ears blasted by what can only be described as a vicious musical interlude for 1m 46s called Victimized. To me it felt as if it was nothing more than an excuse for Chester to shout. A lot. Over and over again to the point where I was worried about his health. It’s almost as if they thought they were at risk of losing their audience because the last few tracks had not featured their hallmark sound. Or maybe they were scared of having a more thoughtful and quieter album and they felt the need to remind everyone that they are still a nu-metal or rock band and full of angst and are angry and grrrrr, look at me!
For every evolution in the tracks up to that point, Victimized felt like a complete devolution. It felt like version 0 of Linkin Park, something they did on their demo album before Hybrid Theory where someone said, yeah it’s a good sound, but it needs to be more than Chester shouting which then led into their break out album.
There was one song, Until It Breaks, that I just loathe. Linkin Park are known for experimenting and mixing sounds and styles, but this is a hideous mish-mash. It starts as one thing, jumps to something else, then something else, then a bit of a chorus, then something else, and it just doesn’t gel together. At all. The second half of the album is definitely weaker, but if you can get past the saccharin nature of Roads Untravelled, and 
you skip the next musical interlude Tin Foil, which seems kind of pointless, and make it to Powerless then it’s not bad. One last thing before I end on more of a positive note. In this mp3, single track download era, where people pick and choose songs and discard the rest, I’m still a traditionalist. I listen to an album as an entity, and I think Linkin Park share that approach as their tracks blend into one another with no long pauses in between songs but as a whole this album is erratic and inconsistent, especially when compared to the others.
So overall I’d give it a 7/10 but there are some great tracks on there that make this album worth buying. And even if I didn’t enjoy it as much as the first two, it was worth the gamble and I’m glad I bought it.
Stephen Aryan 