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JennYLinkin Park - A Thousand Suns Album Review
September 19th 2010 22:16
Genre: Alternative Rock
Length: 47:56
Label: Warner Bros.
Three years after the massively underrated Minutes To Midnight, Linkin Park have returned with A Thousand Suns, an album which will either blow your mind by its sheer power and ambition or will leave you scratching your head in confusion. Hopefully, it will be the former rather than the latter as the band takes its listeners to new musical heights.
First things first, A Thousand Suns isn’t simply a collection of songs, it is an ALBUM in the truest sense of the word. It is meant to listen from start to finish and examining every single track as a single entity only serves to diminish the artistic value of the whole. Where Minutes To Midnight evoked the infamous Doomsday Clock, A Thousand Suns is a musical explosion of ambient noise, famous speeches, keyboard riffs, turntable scratches, intense drums and excellent vocal performances, putting Linkin Park in a genre of their own.
The first hint that this album is just one whole piece split into various parts comes with the first track The Requiem which features the same lyrics as The Catalyst’s second verse:
Will we burn inside the fires of a thousand suns
For the sins of our hand
The sins of our tongue
The sins of our father
The sins of our young"
From those ominous words, the intro segues into The Radiance where Oppenheimer’s quote about Vishnu plays over clicks and a Judgement Day-like crescendo of percussions. The Radiance then fades smoothly into Burning In The Skies where both Mike Shinoda and Chester Bennington share lead vocals. However, Shinoda doesn’t rap here, opting to croon instead as he did on Minutes To Midnight’s “In Between.” Although the dynamic itself isn’t new – in the old days, Shinoda would rap on the verses and Bennington would sing on the chorus – Mike’s singing has a certain vulnerability that perfectly matches the tone of the album. Musically though, Burning In The Skies (along with Iridescent) is the closest thing there is to Minutes To Midnight on this album with Brad Delson and Dave “Phoenix” Farrell leading the fray with some slick guitar and bass work.
After a quick interlude aptly named Empty Spaces (crickets are the major noisemakers here, with sounds of war echoing off in the distance), Linkin Park ramp up the aggression level on When They Come For Me. Backed by Rob Bourdon’s excellent drumming, Mike Shinoda delivers two great boastful verses reminiscent of his Fort Minor work. “I am / the opposite of wack / opposite of weak, Opposite of slack / synonym of heat, Synonym of crack / closest to a peak, Far from a punk, Ya'll ought to stop talking / start trying to catch up motherfucker,” he bellows at the end of the second verse.
Shinoda is so good that the song doesn’t even have a proper chorus as the band went for a wordless cry to complete the track instead. Chester’s only appearance is on the bridge which serves as an intro to the song’s outro. The latter sounds like the score of an action movie, a mix between Transformers and The Bourne Trilogy with the wordless cry given a slightly Middle Eastern tone during that part.
Bourdon and Shinoda deliver the goods again in Wretches And Kings which starts with Mario Savio’s famous “Bodies upon the gears” speech. Savio’s inclusion is proof that the little things do matter in the grand scheme of things. Without it, Wretches And Kings would just be another good-but-not-great track. His passionate words serve as a perfect build-up to the song. When those five notes kick in at the end of his speech, the listener is already pumped up and craving for the energy that’s about to burst through.
Excerpts of Martin Luther King’s “Beyond Vietnam” speech serve as a transition from the loud and violent Wretches And Kings to the relatively quiet and beautifully tragic Iridescent.
Similarly to Burning In The Skies, Iridescent features Shinoda on the verses and Bennington on the chorus. Yet, the song’s brightest spot has to be the full band singing the chorus in unison like a crowd during a live show. I definitely look forward to live performances of this track.
The interlude Fallout follows Iridescent and, similarly to The Requiem which featured lyrics from The Catalyst (as does Jornada del Muerto which has The Catalyst's bridge sung in Japanese), Fallout echoes Burning In The Skies’ chorus in a robotic voice. This interconnection between tracks reinforces the idea of a whole when talking about the album and makes interludes almost as important as the songs themselves.
The lead single of the album, The Catalyst is a mix of all the elements found in this album – poignant lyrics, unique instrumental where every instrument has an important role, and a great vocal performances by the two frontmen. By itself, The Catalyst is weird. When I first heard it, I was instantly put off by its instrumental because it didn’t sound like anything else. When put in context of the album however, it’s a brilliant track, the sum of all the other songs.
The Catalyst music video
A Thousand Suns concludes with The Messenger, a track totally stripped of all the sound effects present in the rest of the album, leaving only an acoustic guitar, piano, and a bass as accompaniments to Chester Bennington. It could almost be interpreted as a folk song if it wasn’t for the rawness in Bennington’s voice. His singing put me off at first but the tone matched well with the overall message of the track – the hope that “love keeps us kind” even after all this destruction and devastation.
However, great lyrics aren’t the only thing that makes a song great, a great performance is equally important and if Chester was somewhat good on The Messenger, he brings it all out in Blackout, the ninth track of the album. In Blackout, the Linkin Park frontman shows why he is one of the best vocalists out there. His energy is infectious and his style inimitable. You’ll easily find yourself nodding your head along to the beat and pressing on “repeat” when the track’s done. Having listened to this album non-stop since its release, I pretty much play Blackout and continue on to Wretches And Kings before repeating both tracks. Those two along with When They Come For Me, Burning In The Skies and Iridescent are the album’s brightest spots.
In the end, A Thousand Suns is a sonic experience unlike anything you’ve ever heard before. Apart from The Messenger which is only audibly different, all the tracks are interconnected musically and lyrically, dealing with themes such as hope, despair, compassion and destruction. Having the voice of historical figures such as Oppenheimer and Martin Luther King resonate through the record only enhances the scope of the band’s work. A Thousand Suns is, in my mind, one of the best – if not the best – album released this year. 5/5.
Full tracklist:
1. The Requiem
2. The Radiance
3. Burning In The Skies
4. Empty Spaces
5. When They Come For Me
6. Robot Boy
7. Jornada Del Muerto
8. Waiting For The End
9. Blackout
10. Wretches And Kings
11. Wisdom, Justice, And Love
12. Iridescent
13. Fallout
14. The Catalyst
15. The Messenger
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