Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ

1. Dear Chester,
I don't say this often, old chap but PHWOAR, innit.
Me

2. Is that the instrumental part from the Busta Rhymes single?
No it is not. At all.

3. HAHAHAHAHAHAHA oh dear no I suppose it is kind of sweet actually, if I had actual emotions and not an unsympathetic, robotic soul, forged of evil in a fiery volcano.

4. Srsly this video is really pretty.

5. The video is ridiculously expensive, especially in comparison to 'We Made It,' where they're just standing in that place (or are they? No.) - do I actually know anything about that song? NOTE TO SELF: YOUTUBE

6. Where are the ridiculous spag-outs? And I don't say that lightly.

As you can see, that tells you absolutely nothing about the song, contains no coherent process of thought and has strong suggestions that I nipped off to get a cup of coffee and a sandwich repeatedly between snippets. That, I feel, however, gets my routine gripes about tracks off 'Minutes to Midnight' dealt with in a surprisingly swift manner and allows me to get on with the srs bsns of telling you how things aint how they were when I was an angry teenager.

Now it's been said time and time again that no one expects bands to keep with the same sound for the whole of their creative lives and a band doing that generally leads to bleating complaints of stagnation and irrelevance. However, there is a definite dimension to the idea that if when a band first appears they basically define a genre, with a new and genuinely interesting sound then suddenly veering off into very safe territory is generally probably not an artistically justifiable move, at least not if they wish to continue to be known as groundbreakers.

Linkin Park have now done both those things; 'Meteora' was an unsatisfying album in the sense that it was 'Hybrid Theory' all over again and 'Minutes to Midnight' is an unsatisfying album because it does the veering. Their song structure is still surprisingly similar, albeit the rap element has been removed, the melodies stay largely the same. The lyrics, even no more profound than those on their first album and this is unfortunate, since it wasn't actually those aspects which really made a Linkin Park song work.

All the songs on 'Hybrid Theory' could have been power ballads, if they'd been produced that way. My personal favourite track, aged 13, was 'Forgotten,' and it's far from a big stretch of the imagination to see that turn into a softer song, if you dig out your old CD/mp3 and give it a spin. The joy, though, of Linkin Park's music was that it was very pretty, at its core. The aggression of the songs fought continuously with Chester's voice, then as now gentler than you get the feeling he wants it to be. That was interesting.

Now, what can I say? It's a song about the death, to a large extent. None of the neurosis of 'Jesus Christ' by Brand New (for instance) is present, though, it's more like a lullaby than a breakdown. The song tinkles along in such a pleasant little manner that it's hard to believe that it's actually about the worry that no one will remember good things about you when you die.

This is the problem with having gone cool, really. If Linkin Park had dealt with these more adult subjects in a more adult version of their complex, aggressive earlier work then this would be really interesting, the weak vocal melody and lyrics more than covered for. As it is, there's nothing to disguise this song's weaknesses and it ends up an anaemic and almost parodical whine, rather than a statement.

Download: Out now
CD Released: July 14th

(Hazel Robinson)

PS: The has this to say about the video: "I think that live videos for singles are cheap. Even if they cost several thousand dollars for making it, they're cheap".

Could. Not. Agree. More.