uvgt2bkdnme asked: why you like my post about raging over my favorite team?? (yes, i'm intentionally using no grammar on a question to an English major.)

I just thought it was hilarious how upset you were over it. Rofl. It’s okay, I have a special fondness for the Y-U-No guy, so your question was in an acceptable format.

sustenanceforthefuture asked: We were friends on MFP before I started following you on Tumblr!

Well I’m glad you found your way to my blog too! Haha. I tend to be a bit more post-happy here than on MFP, I think.

Maybe someday I’ll ever update this blog again, but for now, you can find me at my secondary home of weight loss: gloryorhumiliation. (: Come find me!

It’s heart-wrenching noise, blinding rage, and lyrical genius. It is impossible, however, to appreciate A Thousand Suns without revisiting Linkin Park’s origins on the deathbed of nu-metal.

Let me preface this by saying that I haven’t followed Linkin Park from the beginning. I was much too young while they were still underground, and barely nine years old when Hybrid Theory was released. If there was a die-hard generation of Linkin Park followers, I missed out on belonging to it by about five or six years. I did, however, catch the tail end of Meteora’s success. It was the first album I ever bought. I was fourteen years old. I had heard only “Numb” and “Somewhere I Belong”, and despite the alien sounds, despite the screaming, I had to find that album. There was something about it, something I didn’t understand yet, but that I wanted to.

I had to choke it down. My parents had filled me with sixties and seventies and, most recently, country music, and Meteora wasn’t even music, in comparison. Meteora was pain, and fear, and rage. It was noise. I couldn’t help but fall in love with it, after the initial shock. It unlocked a feeling of righteous anger that I’d never felt before. In all my adolescent angst, I finally became furious. It was as though they were in my head, untangling my thoughts, and pouring them out exactly as I felt them. It stayed in my CD player for months on end. If I’ve ever had a religious experience, that was it. When my first boyfriend broke up with me over a year later, I bought Hybrid Theory. My trust in Linkin Park was implicit. The screaming, the heavy guitar riffs, the furious rapping, it all spoke to me personally the way it spoke to millions of other fans just as personally.

But Linkin Park is not nu-metal anymore.

Their value as musicians stems from their willingness to take risks. They could have happily and comfortably produced album after album that sounded like Hybrid Theory or Meteora. Their fans, myself included, would never have tired of it. They are, however, risk-takers. They chose to evolve. A Thousand Suns is the product of that revolution.

The album opens on “The Requiem”, a haunting soundscape and a synthesized voice that is merely a prelude to the chilling message ahead. As the short track blends into “The Radiance”, J. Robert Oppenheimer’s voice recalls the atomic bomb. The frigid, electronic soundscape remains as he speaks; it is vaguely reminiscent of churning machines. “I remembered the line from the Hindu Scripture, the Bhagavad Gita. Krishna was trying to persuade the prince that he should do his duty, and to impress him takes on his multi-armed form and says, ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’” There are a few seconds of noise. “I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.”

A Thousand Suns is a concept album, and the concept is now clear. Nuclear warfare.

The thread of consistency sweeps into “Burning in the Skies”, and we hear Mike Shinoda sing, rather than rap, the opening. Chester Bennington doesn’t scream his chorus; he, too, is singing. It isn’t rage, but disappointment, and a thread of scrambling terror. The somber tone, occasionally accelerating, is enough proof of that. It is a sickening and poignant feeling, as heart-wrenching as the blood of the innocents being mourned. The world is ending. We cannot save ourselves from what we’ve done or the bridges we’ve burned. The torment is palpable.

It wouldn’t be Linkin Park, though, if they didn’t let loose once in a while, and after the short interlude of “Empty Spaces”, Shinoda does just that. The man is clearly a mind-reader. “When They Come For Me” was designed for those who were doubtful about their movement as a band toward a new sound. “Even the blueprint is a gift and a curse, because once you have the theory of how the thing works, everybody wants the next thing to be just like the first”, almost certainly describes the many audiences and critics who are disappointed by their movement away from nu-metal.

Rage makes a brilliant comeback, but the sound is still changing. It’s more electronic, and the background vocals, as well as some synthesized sounds, are distinctly tribal. You can’t help but love the chorus, though: “Y’all oughta stop talking and start tryna catch up, motherfucka!” It’s reminiscent of “Get Me Gone” from Shinoda’s side-project, The Rising Tied, and still just as poignant. Good to know he still isn’t afraid to say what he thinks.

The album softens again with “Robot Boy”, builds into the brief interlude “Journada Del Muerto”, and continues on this vein with “Waiting For The End.” I’m disappointed with this middle space of the album, not because of the lyrics, but because of the sound. The slow pace and somber tones of “Burning in the Skies” were still reminiscent of an internalized, tortured mind, but this has faded in these three middle tracks, and it leaves a strangely empty sound in its wake. Aggression isn’t necessary, as we haven’t yet seen Bennington scream once yet in this album and the beginning was very impressive, but the dreamlike noise of “Robot Boy” and “Waiting for the End” rob the message of its poignancy.

“Blackout”, however, brings it back. Bennington’s screaming makes a reappearance, and it is venomous, exactly the kind of blood-in-your-throat noise that Linkin Park is famous for. The soundscape, of course, is not familiar. It is, however, a risky and artistic contrast; the dreamlike trance of the three previous tracks perseveres with an increased pace, but with the addition of Bennington’s scream, it’s stark and enraged.

“Wretches and Kings” had me right away, of course. I’m a Berkeley undergraduate, and it begins with a soundbite of Mario Savio’s “Bodies Upon the Gears” speech, which he made as a student on the steps of Sproul at my university. The rage of the previous track is preserved again with a carnivorous, wretched background sound that engulfs the dreamlike noise of earlier tracks. Shinoda’s rapping segments are spat with righteous anger, and Bennington’s half-screamed chorus only escalates that emotion.

This blends into “Wisdom, Justice, and Love”, where another soundbite makes an appearance, this one given by Martin Luther King Jr. and overlaid with Shinoda’s keyboarding. It’s chilling. Just over a minute long, it features nothing but the voice, the keyboard, a slowly escalating chorus of voices, and the degradation of Martin Luther King Jr.’s voice into a synthesized, robotic, eerie menace. The keyboard blends into the next track, “Iridescent”, which features Shinoda’s somber singing once again. The ray of optimism and acceptance in this track is not something that should be acceptable from Linkin Park, and yet, following the previous interlude, it has its perfect place in this album. Filled with a soft, electronic sound, gentle drumbeats, and the memory of past wrongs, it is uplifting, kin to forgiveness. The memory of pain is still strong, but the message here is “Let it go”.

A synthesized voice reprises the chorus of “Burning in the Skies” during the brief interlude of “The Fallout”. This bleeds quickly into “The Catalyst”, the first single off the album, and a powerful one at that. It, in itself, is a reprise of the synthesized voice throughout “The Requiem”, much more quickly paced, as Shinoda half-sings, half-chants the opening. He’s joined quite soon by Bennington, who doesn’t quite scream, but the aggression and the warning that goes along with it is still there. The electronic noise is joined by guitar, by keyboard, by drums; it’s an explosive ending to the album, a wake-up call to the damage we do to our own world through nuclear welfare and its ever-present threat.

There’s one last track, though, called “The Messenger”, and if anything was completely unexpected, it was this. It’s merely Bennington, a guitar, and a keyboard. Once upon a time, his screaming vocals spoke to me, personally. His rage and torment filled me up with righteous anger. His voice strains nearly to a scream, but the message is different. It refers to everything that is wrong in our cruel world, but reminds listeners that “when life leaves us blind, love keeps us kind”. It’s a heartfelt, emotionally rendered end to an album of destruction and war, a reminder that there is a solution, but it isn’t the fire of a thousand suns.

You might not expect that from a band that was once characterized by pain and rage, but they’re out to say something these days. They’re not just venting anymore. Despite my continuing love for their earlier albums, their courage to evolve speaks to me just as much as nu-metal did.

5/5 stars.