[Review] Linkin Park - The Hunting Party

Everyone needs some guilty pleasure music in their lives, sometimes I just want to listen to something catchy and simple no matter how silly it sounds or how cheesy the lyrics are. In my case, that spot is reserved for Linkin Park, a band as polarizing as it is successful.

Their last two albums have shown a steady decline in electronic instrumentation towards heavy guitars and a more "classical LP" sound mixing hip hop, clean and harsh vocals and more formulaic songwriting. "The Hunting Party" makes away with most of their electronic elements for a big part of the album, and is probably their most guitar heavy album since 2003's "Meteora", something older fans may appreciate, but at the same time, and like the band clarified, this new release sounds more "middle aged guys writing angry music" and not so much like the "teenage nu metal" of their first two albums.

"The Hunting Party" doesn't slow down a bit until past the first half with the song "Until It's Gone", which should have probably been removed for the sake of the album as it's probably their most formulaic and cliche song (the chorus basically repeats "'cause you don't know what you have until it's gone"). The second half of the album is more varied, featuring two ballads and one instrumental track featuring a discrete appearance by Tom Morello on guitar, one of the four guest collaborators on the album. The slower tracks, like the aforementioned "Until It's Gone" are more basic and contrast with the riffs and dynamic drumming of the heaviest tracks. 

Unlike the last LP albums were most of the attention was put on the vocals, on "The Hunting Party" the guitars and drums are the stars, while the drumming is basic by today standards (and so is the guitar) at times it sounds like their most instrumentally adventurous record, and that's something LP really has to work on. Going back to the vocals, both Mike and Chester are hit-or-miss here, Chester is on top of his game when it comes to screaming but the rest of his melodies sound tired and recycled, Mike's rapping sounds more basic and monotonous than ever, and Rakim totally outshines him on lead single "Guilty All The Same", compared to the rest of the record.

It's good that despite being one of the most commercially successful bands out there they still want to try new things and while this album may not be perfect it's a good stepping stone if they want to continue on this road for their next release.

Rating: enjoyable

For fans of: pop rock with hardcore/punk elements, nu metal

Accessibility: high

Highlights: "Guilty All The Same", "Rebellion", "Mark The Graves"

Linkin Park Is Recording A "Prequel to Hybrid Theory" And I Don't Even Know What To Think Anymore.

Wow, that's one hell of a long title, so... where do I begin? As a teenager I was kind of obsessed with Linkin Park, though I never saw them live (they never came to my country in that period as far as I know) I had all their albums and I spent a lot of my free time listening to them. I'm sure most of you are familiar with their first two albums, but basically it was very basic, cheesy, hip hop meets pop-metal, which was trendy back in 2000-2003. So it's easy to see why so many people love them and why so many people hate them, I went through both stages before I completely forgot about them.

But one day I decided I was listening to too much prog rock, experimental music and all kinds of weird shit and I didn't want to be a pretentious asshole, I needed some guilty pleasure music to balance things a bit. So what I did was check where the hell Linkin Park had gone after I basically erased them from my life, and I was quite suprised to see that they had gone experimental... but wait! I don't mean experimental in the King Crimson/The Mars Volta sense... but more like "let's try to expand our sound" kind-of-experimental.

Last time I checked Linkin Park had recorded a "mash up" album with rapper Jay-Z, things could hardly get any more mainstream... well, it seems a few years later they decided they wanted to piss off most of their (huge) fan base by ditching their nu-metal sound in favour of other kinds of modern music. As it is to be expected from a band whose fan base is comprised mostly of teenagers and "ex teenagers" which can't deal with their favourite band trying new things, people hated the follow up to "Meteora" (2003), to be fair it was all over the place, "Minutes To Midnight" (2007) had a few decent pop rock songs but mostly it was a bunch of ideas the band decided to explore. 

But as if they didn't have had enough with pissing off half of their fan base by removing the "angry" lyrics and hip hop elements present through all their career, they decided they wanted to double the bet by getting rid of all the harsh vocals and heavy, processed, guitar riffs... the result was the quasi-progressive electronic pop experiment called "A Thousand Suns", this definitely was the final insult to the most conservative part of their fanbase, no harsh screaming, no heavy guitars, almost no hip hop and a lot of instrumental interludes. Suprisingly I loved it, after spending countless hours listening to bands like The Mars Volta, King Crimson, Mastodon, etc, memorizing all their solos, bass lines, drum patterns and every little bit of noise, I was really enjoying their music.

At this point you are probably wondering where the hell am I going with this, well my opinion is Linkin Park is one of those bands that are very easy to hate (or should I say it is "cool" to hate them?) but I think everyone should leave all bias aside and give their albums a try. All their albums are different and if there's one thing you can't deny is that their songs are catchy as hell. Don't expect to find amazing musicianship (at least not in the technical sense), just try to relax and enjoy it. I'm not going to talk about "Living Things" (2012) and their next album "The Hunting Party" (coming soon) so you can listen to them and decide whether it is your thing or not yourself, torrent all their stuff and give it a try, just please... PLEASE don't listen to "Recharged"...