Definitely the best song so far. Really digging mikes verse and the chorus. Chester sounds amazing so far on this album
I see where you're coming from. I guess here it sticks out even more because of how blatantly sterile and digital the production is.
Well, I had heard that Heavy and BS were two of the weakest tracks on the album and that the rest were better, so if the massive amounts of praise I've been reading are accurate, it seems that held true. I can't listen to it until about another hour. At work, and it would be frowned upon to be listening on my cell phone
The bongo is cool. and the 8-bit synth on Stormzy verse is also cool. The Alvin and the Chipmunks voice is not cool. Somehow it reminded me "We Made It"
I actually really like this song, especially the production. Mike goes hard on here. I also like Stormzy's part, but that might be because I listen to a lot of UK Hip-Hop and love the accent! Only the lyrics aren't that good on paper (but the flow and production make up for it)
The ideas that came and went during the process, and the various decisions that lead to this result, would have involved everyone in the band, co-producers and co-writers. Now, if you have the complete idea ready to go, anyone could execute it, yes. However simple or complex they are, finished songs are typically the end result of countless ideas being created, kept, discarded, flipped, whatever. They're products of specific people, influences, tools, times and spaces.
That's one thing I can definitely appreciate about the instrumental. Each section of the song changes in a significant way. The first chorus/intro is very calm. They introduce the beat with Mike's verse. The second chorus builds the percussion up to the "drop" along with adding harmonies to the "Good Goodbye" line. Pusha's verse has the full beat with constant variation in the actual drum pattern, which is cool. The sped up vocal introduces rather than closes out the next chorus, which is a "proper" chorus in terms of the instrumentation. Then half of the elements get pulled out in favor of bass, kick, snaps, and a fun little arpeggio on the synth. And so on and so forth. A lot of people keep saying the production is sterile but there's a lot I can respect about how THIS beat was made in comparison to, oh, "let's get a weird sample and loop it with drums and guitars and shit and call it Nobody's Listening".
Really digging the song. Im not a huge fan of the style Mike rapped with but hey, it sounded dope. His energy was there and it clearly showed. He went with the flow that most rappers are going for today but to me, he did it better. Chester once again nailed his parts.
I'm loving that the band is actually releasing a better song each time so it just gets better and better.
That is true. People who defend Linkin Park's earliest full-lengths sometimes talk about how, even if the guitar lines or the drums aren't the most technically impressive ever heard, typically, they're tastefully done, such that everything fits together nicely. That's not the easiest thing to achieve, there's a lot of precision involved from carefully picking a tone to nailing down how it should all be mixed. LP's attention to detail is what makes those kind of things possible.