It's always funny how different the reactions between LPA and casual/non-fans are split on LT. Most people actually think the first 5 songs on Living Things was their best post-Meteora and that the second half was half-hearted jabs at experimenting that needed a lot more fleshing out. I also think the "It would have been a good EP" thing is funny too, since that was a lot of reaction in regards to ATS.
In regards to "casual fans", it's really difficult to see them as being the "defining audience". I mean, "casual fans" and "non-fans" only know Radiohead for Creep. They only know NIN for Closer or Head Like A Hole. To put it bluntly, most people are stupid and uninformed. Most people bitch and moan about Pink Floyd's final album being mostly instrumental, not knowing it was a farewell to founding member Richard Wright, who passed away. Most people write off John Mayer for being an acoustic softie when he's got proper chops as a blues guitarist, enough to impress Pino fuckin' Palladino of all people. Most people think T-Pain is a talentless autotune hack when in reality he's a fantastic singer who decided that standing out with a specific style was better for his career. Most people think Lady Gaga is just a completely manufactured pop icon who does extravagant shit for the fuck of it, when in reality she's got serious songwriting skills, vocal and piano skills, the whole shebang. But like T-Pain, she decided to find a way to stand out so that her skills could be recognized. The tough thing about ATS is that each song was so meticulously crafted to meld into one another that taking something out would lessen the entire product. Take out, say, Burning in the Skies. The impact of returning to that chorus for Fallout would be lessened, and vice versa. The explosion of drums in WTCFM causes a greater impact on Robot Boy. Robot Boy into JDM into WFTE is essential much like The Frail into The Wretched in NIN's The Fragile. The interconnected nature of ATS makes it hard to take something out or put something in its stead or in between. Like, I loved Primo and think it's far superior to I'll Be Gone. But as it is I don't see an ideal spot to place it.
Calling War bad is entirely subjective. People either get the vibe of the song and love it to death, or they don't and they despise it. Plain and simple. I would agree with the rest of your claim though in saying the other three songs are of lesser quality to the rest of The Hunting Party. Also your Empty Spaces > Until It's Gone claim is just looking for trouble. Other than that I'd probably agree that looking at A Thousand Suns as an album, it is cohesively the greater experience, though I'd also argue Wastelands/Until It's Gone surpass Wretches And Kings, and that Wisdom, Justice, And Love is equal to the Summoning. Nope, I'm with you. Until It's Gone has an unreal atmosphere and although the lyrics blow chunks, the melody and delivery is amazing.
Can't agree, in fact I think it's actually pretty odd you chose to go the "uninformed pleb" route when most of the people I have in mind that think LP are mediocre are actually fairly snobbish in their musical tastes. And truth be told, when they start taking, they're not necessarily saying things I don't agree with. I know most of us here are going to fall under the "super fan" label to some extent, but I think the bands creativity, or their ability to pull of their ideas more specifically, is highly exaggerated here. When people who normally don't like Linkin Park praise Lost in the Echo, it's usually followed with the explanation that it's the band doing something that's "within their ability", for lack of better wording. Lost in the Echo isn't necessarily genre pushing, epic, or risky, but it's a song where every little bit adds to the overall result without overpowering or distracting from another; the synth is peppered in juuuuuuuuust enough to add flavor without becoming annoying, things like that. The band deserves credit for attempting to break out of the box and doing something to avoid becoming relics of the early 2000s. In a lot of ways they've succeeded way beyond anything anyone really expected. On average though? Their hit/miss ratio seems to skew a bit more 50/50 than really gets mentioned here. ATS is... a thing for sure. I disagree again. I Don't think the album really needed it's nearly 3 minutes of intros. There's interconnected, and then there's bloated. A few seconds here and there doesn't sound like much in the grand scheme, but it goes back to the "hit and miss" thing. Not every part of ATS was untouchable brilliance by a long shot, and while everything can really just be explained as opinions, I really, genuinely think that cut out/blend the intros, make Fallout not be nearly a minute and a half, and shitcan Wretches and Kings, ATS would have been a classic. But those problems are still there, and while the album totally deserves credit for it's attempts, to me, it aims a tad higher than it really hits the mark. Living Things is a better example of that. I assume people here hate the first half for following a "formula" and love the latter for being... not quite as formulaic? Let's talk more about that. Like I said before, Lost in the Echo is nearly flawless in its "formula", and the fact that it sticks to a formula at all shouldn't be quite the problem I think it is for a lot of people here. Same with most of the first half of the album, really, it's "basic" rock songs, but their done very, very well. When the album tries to experiment? A lot of what results seems to be... well... again, hit and miss. I'd be lying if I said I didn't appreciate some of Victimized, but I don't listen to it in its entirety very often. Roads Untraveled isn't a bad song, nice and mellow, good harmonies, but it.. just sort of lingers there, doesn't it? The chorus is "whoa" stretched out, no real build up to anything, it's almost like a musical intermission to something else. An exaggerated ATS interlude. Skin to Bone, when I heard the preview to that before the album dropped, I nearly pissed myself. Chester sounded amazing in the chorus from what they had showed and I was all set for a modern Park classic. The final product was disappointing, to say the less. A bored Mike giving us monotone couplets and tired metaphors. Something I really, really looked forward to ended up being sort of a wash. Until It Breaks... well, I think everyone here has made known what they think of UIB. The Hunting Party demonstrated what I had been saying about the band for years; if they dropped the attitude of trying to meticulously craft a masterpiece and went in to make a rock album, as a rock band (and they are still a "rock" band), the results would be worthwhile. They were able to get weird on songs like Keys to the Kingdom, 'experiment' with A Line in the Sand and Mark the Graves, do their classic ballad antics with Final Masquerade, and produce "routine rock songs" that were top notch. A misstep here or there aside, it was Linkin Park cutting the crap and doing what they were good at while still coming up with a surprise here and there. I went off on a tangent, but tl;dr we all appreciate the band going for broke with the stuff they do sometimes, but we're lying to ourselves if we're really sitting here and saying they've pulled off every experiment flawlessly. The attempt at something shouldn't be the only thing they get credited for, the end result is what matters; someone who can bake a mean cake isn't necessarily going to grill a proper steak.
Nothing beats their first two album. To me they're not just classic albums from the last fifthteen years, they're also the band's landmarks as it is to Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall, but THP is my third favorite album by them.
Yeah Minus, just because people have a different opinion doesn't give you the right to call them uninformed and stupid I feel No offense though
Well yes I understand that, but I guess it was just another classic case of a point sounding like undisputed fact rather than opinion.
There's a difference between being uninformed and having an opinion. I'm speaking mainly of the uninformed blanket general public that say, for example, Lady Gaga is a vanity act with no talent.
Point 1: The bolded part is just going to be something that some fans are always going to disagree on. When you and others use the word "intro" in regards to ATS, it often feels like you are using it as...an insult? A way to demean or dismiss those pieces of music? As if to say "yes yes yes, Jornada del Muerto, great, now where's Chester?" People seem to want to jump right to the meat and potatoes, aka songs with vocals. This is just a taste thing I guess, but music without vocals is every bit as real of a song as music with vocals. And I know you know that, and I know most people know that, but there's still a weird vibe that comes out where people treat instrumentals like they are second tier. Again, there's no accounting for taste, but it seems unfortunate to lump instrumentals all together as "intros that are too long." Point 2: I've always thought the attitude of "Artist X needs to cut the crap and do what they do" was really condescending towards the artist. Do you not have faith Linkin Park could ever be more than "rock band that does rock songs"? I don't have an answer to that myself (although I'm starting to think that really is what they are), but A Thousand Suns will always linger as the single shred of evidence that the band does have the creative balls to aim higher. Point 3: That's the great thing about experimenting though: sometimes it does fail. Hell, sometimes it HAS to fail. Experimenting is about finding something different. That thing might come across totally incoherent, but the ambition counts for something. For instance: there's a foreign film Goodbye To Language that just came out. It uses 3D in a really new and original way. Some people think the movie is a total mess, but its technical innovation can't be argued. I will forever argue that a movie like that has 100x more artistic merit than a movie like The Imitation Game, which is a perfectly well and good biopic that will be forgotten in 2 years because 10 more biopics just like it will have come out. Is The Imitation Game a better executed movie than Goodbye To Language? Sure. But Goodbye To Language, as an experiment that comes across to some as incoherent, may change film entirely. That's worth way more than perfect execution if you ask me. And if you're going to attempt to experiment like that, you are going to fail. That's necessary. Linkin Park took one small stab at it and called it quits, which is why I've soured on them.
On the live version! Over time, I've come to consider Linkin Park a band, rather than a band of any specific genre. I appreciate that my favourite artists move away from things that have already been done, whether by them or by others. People who tell me that it's the Linkin Park's job to make x type of music and that they shouldn't have the freedom to do whatever they want ... are pathetic. They're always rock fans, which is no surprise. Being an artist, in any medium, isn't being a factory worker or anything along those lines. From my perspective, I literally pay my favourite artists to do whatever they want, so that's what I expect them to do.
A Thousand Suns doesn't have 3 minutes of intros. You're missing the point as soon as you look at it like that.
Wow you come off like a total douchebag here. Holy shit. No, dick, I don't instantly think THIS DOESN'T HAVE SINGING IN IT INTO THE TRASH IT GOES, actually go back and read it and you'll see I don't actually mention Jornada del Muerto. This isn't splitting hairs, that was deliberate, Jornada del Muerto is well done and not "BLUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUURG SWIIIIIMING IN THE SMOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOKE", minute and a half reprise-intro. Didn't pop Wisdom, Justice, And Love in their either, and that's HUR HUR NOT A SONG either, and I deliberately left it out because I know what an interlude can be. When done right. Not every attempt at "artsy" hits the mark and boy does ATS do nothing if not shoot for "artsy" in everything it does. No, and my huge wall of text is a good explanation for why. Balls is fine, but not every college students 'art' film is brilliant cinema and not every actor who tries to do something out of his comfort zone pulls it off 100% of the time. They did a variety of music and it seemed as though their track record signaled they were doing on particular thing significantly better than another and based my opinion on that. This in particular is a funny train of thought, and partially why I really am baffled by the way a lot of you guys do the "You just don't get it" defense. You know a lot of ATS was similar to stuff that other bands do better all the time right? It was new and mind-blowing for Linkin Park to be doing it, but there are dozens of bands that are doing that. Every counter-opinion has this "Well I'm sure listening to nothing but radio-rock I'm sure you're confused and upset that it's just not rap-scream-rap-scream, but I assure you it's actually quality..." as though people don't realize it and are comparing it unfavorably to that kind of music. It's swell that the band tries weird shit every so often, some of the time it ends up pretty good. And other times it doesn't, and when it doesn't it still counts. And sometimes people who are "informed" still don't like it.