Review Summary: Victimized! Victimized! Never again! Victimized! This sounds like the Linkin Park we all know!
Remember the good old days of Linkin Park? Hybrid Theory... Meteora... and Minutes to Midnight? Those sure were the days, right? Well, those lovely memories were somewhat ruined by the fourth LP A Thousand Suns. An album that showed to be more experimental than the last three. But whilst being experimental shows the will to try new things, it doesn’t always mean it’s going to come out with good results. Yep, A Thousand Suns sure was a horrible mess of an album, and after that, I was cautious about all future Linkin Park works. And then they released Living Things.
Now imagine if Hybrid Theory collided with A Thousand Suns. Living Things is what you get. Linkin Park are still sticking to their guns with their new direction of music, but bring back little essences of Hybrid Theory and Meteora by giving us some screaming work by Chester Bennington in songs Lost In the Echo, Lies Greed Misery and Victimized. But before I heard the album in its entirety, I checked out the first single Burn It Down first. And I was surprised. Burn It Down proved to be alot better than I expected. Musically and lyrically I found it very good, and we also get a decent rap verse from Shinoda. Thank God it wasn’t a repeat of The Catalyst...
And it’s still experimental. But the good kind. Lies Greed and Misery and Victimized were hard hitting, angry songs that got us pumped up the same way One Step Closer and By Myself did. Skin to Bone and Roads Untraveled reminded us of the calmer songs like In Pieces and Leave out All the Rest, and they even gave us the purely instrumental track Tinfoil, which was something like Cure for the Itch and Session from the first two albums. By the time I reached the final track Powerless, I was very shocked. Linkin Park are back. Maybe not in the way we wanted them to be, but Living Things has given hope for the future of Linkin Park. And it’s about time.
Recommended tracks:
In My Remains
Burn It Down
Ill Be Gone
Powerless
