Before Minutes to Midnight, and A Thousand Suns? Now I am NOT bagging on the album, this is just an opinion from a friend. He actually never heard M2M and some of ATS. He attended the Listening Party with me, and heard the album. I let him hear songs from Minutes to Midnight, and he REALLY liked songs from ATS. He feels that Living Things seems like (other than the progression from the last two albums heard in the album) it took a step backward. He said it seems like the music itself in Living Things sounds amazing, but there was a sound that was missing from the previous two. I personally don't feel like this, I still have yet to form a FULL opinion on the album. But this is coming from someone who actually is a big fan of them just never got a chance to purchase their last two albums and bought random songs on iTunes from each album. It got me thinking, what if we heard Living Things first (in some other dimension) and we listened to Minutes to Midnight and A Thousand Suns at the same time for the first time. I'm curious to see if anyone would actually think different of which album sounds more pleasant to the ears lyrically and instrumentally.
If I had heard LT first, I would have though it sucked hard Basically, it means that LT would have came up after Meteora, and at the time, I was expecting a similar sounding album again. Heavy and all. So I would have been disappointed, like I was with MTM at first. With LT coming after MTM and ATS, I knew the new album was going to be something different again, so I was not disappointed by that.
If the album has a progression from the last two albums according to your friend, how can it be a step back? That kind of contradiction makes it hard to understand the question. And why would you be able to listen to MtM and ATS at the same time? It's impossible even in an alternate dimension unless you mean putting them into two separate CD player and blasting them at the same time. Then you could totally do that but i imagine, it wouldn't be pleasant. Plus, LT wouldn't exist without the band writing MtM and ATS so the idea is implausible.
It's kind of impossible really. Living Things is Hybrid Theory, Minutes To Midnight, and A Thousand Suns combined. The sound they've created was only possible after releasing those other albums and taking their best elements. However, hypothetically speaking it would have gotten a lot more praise, and a lot less "It's not A Thousand Suns Part II therefore it's inferior".
I like Living Things a lot but think it feels like the album that should have come out before ATS (especially since MTM is my least favorite album). It's a good piece of work and my 2nd favorite LP album but ATS feels like LP pushing themselves further and, though I enjoy most of it, LT harkening back to HT's style and structures feels like a step back. If LT had been the the third album it would have felt like a more natural transition from that HT sound with ATS feeling like them stepping even further out there. I'm OK with how everything turned out. I think LP wanted to go into the studio and have fun. They like being experimental and they like writing short, catchy songs and it's a good album. This sort of reminds me of how Radiohead blew things out of the water with KidA, scaled things back with Hail to the Theif and pushed themselves further on In Rainbows. Hopefully LP number 6 is LP pushing themselves again.
If I heard LT back in /'03'04 I would have loved it simply because I was a raging LP fanboy at the time. If they had released LT in place of ATS I probably would have like it about the same as I do now since in '10 I had long since passed on from my fanboyism and what I look for in music is pretty much the same as it is now.
MTM took the fall for the future boundary pushing that LP were about to undertake. It was in a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation, given some wanted new sounds and others wanted the same old same old.
If Lp had jumped straight into living things I think the fans would be able to handle it. M2M was essential in preparing for a bigger change. It was a bridge. A foundation of sorts.
Pretty much anything I wanted to say has already been said except that if LT came out first, LP would be locking themself more and more into a position where a MTM or ATS couldn't be possible at all.
Some of the stuff on LT is what I had been wanting after Meteora, so I probably would have loved it in that context. But I still really enjoy it right now after ATS.