Linkin Park - Minutes to Midnight

Minutes to Midnight is to Linkin Park as a finger painting is to a pre-school kid. They put a lot of effort into it, and when it’s finished, they run to you, presenting it to you with a beaming face. “I made it for you,” they say. Of course, you smile a big smile, say “thank you so much,” hug them, and hang it on the refrigerator. But part of you is saying, “it’s just a bunch of smears of badly mixed color on crumpled construction paper.” The artist is so incredibly proud of it, but from a completely objective standpoint, it kinda sucks. That’s what I think of Minutes to Midnight; it kinda sucks.

Just kinda, though. Linkin Park has a few brilliant moments on here, but mostly when they are staying conventional, not when they’re exploring unfamiliar soundscapes, which they do a lot of on this album. Yet for all their creativity and branching out, they’re sticking alarmingly close to home. “Leave Out All the Rest” sounds a lot like “Breaking the Habit.” “Bleed It Out” is the new “Faint.” “What I’ve Done” has strong echoes of “In the End.” They’re not just recycling old material, mind you. If they were, I’d be a lot more disgusted with the album than I am. But I think that they’re so entrenched in their particular style that it’s impossible to get away from, even when they try really hard.

And try they do. From their choice of producers, I’d say they’re being pretty inventive. Rick Rubin has produced some diverse material in the past, from Run DMC to the Red Hot Chili Peppers to System of a Down. I have a feeling his work with the Beastie Boys is the reason he got the chair for Minutes to Midnight, since they represent part of what Linkin Park is striving for: white boy hip-hop, a mix of suburbia and the streets.

The opening track, “Wake,” suggests pretty epic and classic-rock things to come, which the album doesn’t deliver on. It feels like a fragment of a good song, but it’s a really small fragment. The song that follows, “Given Up,” was a very large disappointment to me. Throughout the early 2000s, Linkin Park was a unique bright spot among a literal sea of rapcore bands, all of which spouted profanity like it was going out of style. I’m not against profanity as a rule, but using it with as much frequency as the rapcore movement did shows a vast lack of originality. Linkin Park was different because they didn’t use any profanity; not a single objectionable word. Alas, those days are over, as the f-word pops up on multiple songs, “Given Up” being the first. As I said, I have no problem with profanity being used in its place, but I’m sad at seeing what made Linkin Park stand out fall by the wayside. Oh, and apart from the swearing, “Given Up” is a clunky and bad attempt at a classic rock groove.

“Bleed It Out,” the second single, feels like another fragment as the song seems unfinished. The high-octane energy is cool, but the melody quickly gets grating. Then there’s “Shadow of the Day,” which is haunting, melodic, mature, and so completely NOT Linkin Park. It sounds more like Snow Patrol temporarily changed their name or something. It’s great, but seems very out of place. “Hands Held High” shows some understanding of the current world climate, but the rhetoric it presents, while applicable, sounds exactly like what we’ve heard from a million other musicians who hate Bush and the war. It’s become so clichéd to include some political element in your record nowadays, and I’m getting pretty sick of it.

Linkin Park show their rather obvious Metallica influence on “No More Sorrow,” with some splendid results. And “The Little Things Give You Away” finally gives a little of that epic-ness that we were promised on “Wake,” but it feels forced and incompetent. They score points for trying, but they should just stick to time signatures they’re comfortable playing.

Minutes to Midnight, while having one of the coolest album titles in recent memory, is a disappointing affair, and shows that change is not exactly the same thing as growth. It’s kinda like a college girl who’s out from under daddy’s watchful eye for the first time and decides to try lesbianism. In most cases, it’s just a phase, Minutes to Midnight included. This album was so delayed, and Linkin Park spent so much time and energy on it, that I was expecting something a lot more earth-shaking. A for effort, guys, but how’s about you play “One Step Closer” for us one more time?

Prime Cuts:
Shadow of the Day
No More Sorrow

22 Rating: -4