A Thousand Suns

A quick disclaimer: if you were to ask me what kind of music I enjoy, my canned answer would be "good music". That is, music I enjoy. I no longer purposely avoid music just because it happens to be popular, but I tend to have more luck finding good music I enjoy outside the mainstream. Whether a band is trying to be indie or "selling out" for mainstream popularity isn't a sure indicator of quality--there are plenty of genuinely brilliant bands that are rightly popular, probably even more junky bands that no one has heard of, or should. I'm not worried about listening to the "right" music, but only music that is true and enjoyable.

That said, I have become obsessed with Linkin Park this summer.

Linkin Park's refusal to let their "popular" sound define them has won them my respect. Their first two albums Hybrid Theory and Meteora were pretty standard "rap metal", hugely popular. Minutes to Midnight was even more radio-friendly alternative rock. And I do enjoy all these albums. But in my opinion their latest effort, A Thousand Suns, tops them all. It combines the rap, metal, and alternative influences of their other albums with (at times) ambient music, dance pop, reggae, and honest-to-goodness progressive rock to produce an album as artistically brilliant as it is enjoyable. It's supposedly a concept album, addressing themes like class struggle, social issues, and nuclear weapons.

The first two songs are both basically an extended introduction. "The Requiem" packs on ambient keyboards and strings, with GLaDOS (actually Mike Shinoda's voice pitch-corrected beyond all recognition) singing part of the second-to-last song, "The Catalyst". "The Radiance" has more ominous sound effects and features a sample of J. Robert Oppenheimer's famous "Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds" quote.

Then we get into the first full track, "Burning in the Skies", which despite the title is an exceptionally mellow alternative rock song. It's a bit monotonous, but beautiful with great lyrics. Cool, audible bass during the verses, and great contrast in Chester Bennington's vocals between the verses and chorus. "Empty Spaces" is largely ambient filler with another quick sample (Francisco Franco? I'm not sure) that segues right into "When They Come for Me". It's one of the two fully rap songs on the album, built around a "one-two" beat that eventually gives way to a more ambient section dominated by the vocals. Very cool; I got into this song long before I enjoyed Linkin Park in general.

"Robot Boy" starts with a dramatic piano riff, which continues throughout much of the song. It's definitely one of the more "proggy" songs, very spacey with a keyboard section towards the end. Very interesting work unlike anything on Linkin Park's previous albums. "Jornada del Muerto" is largely just an extended outro to it. Then possibly my favorite song of the album, "Waiting for the End", which wears its reggae influences on its sleeve. It alternates between rapped and sung vocals until the last minute or so, which is just incredible. The first three minutes of the song all seem to overlap and become asymptotically better for it. Glorious.

And then right from reggae to dance pop. At least, that's what "Blackout" is until you get to the screams and crazy record-scratching/skipping. It's the sound of a band trying to alienate all its listeners at once and failing miserably. After the song finishes remixing itself, it mellows out to more poppy singing, which is still quite good.

"Wretches and Kings", a straight-up rap song, begins and ends with samples of Mario Savio's "Bodies upon the gears speech". Pretty cool, though I more prefer LP's rap when it's mixed with several other things. "Wisdom, Justice, and Love",another transition track, samples Martin Luther King Jr., eventually repeating the same line with increasing amounts of distortion until it sounds demonic. Yikes. "Iridescent" is definitely the most radio-friendly track of the album, singing about hope in the midst of the chaos the other songs bring up.

The last ambient track, "Fallout", repeats the chorus of "Burning in the Skies"--a counterpart to the flashforward in "The Requiem". "The Catalyst" would be a majestic album closer if it were the last track, bringing together musical elements of previous songs with multiple layered electronic beats, keyboard ambiance, screeching guitars, and both vocalists singing in unison. Quite epic indeed. Rather than end the album there, though, it continues into "The Messenger", with an acoustic guitar as the only instrumentation to accompany the anguished vocals. Very personal-sounding, stripped-back, and quite unlike the rest of the album, which makes it stand out more--combined with the title, maybe the repeated lyrics "When life leaves us blind/Love keeps us kind" is meant to be the moral.

A Thousand Suns is a huge leap forward for Linkin Park, reestablishing them as a genuinely artistic band deserving of their popularity. I can't think of another album with as much variance in style between songs--Pain of Salvation mainly only changes styles between albums. The full-length songs are pretty much all memorable and enjoyable, particularly because of how varied they are. Though good, the shorter, ambient/sampled tracks kind of come off as filler, and I wish there were a few more full songs instead.