Dan Gennoe, dotmusic.co.uk, March 2003
Linkin Park's debut album, Hybrid Theory, sold an enviable 14 million copies, rating it as America's biggest selling album of 2001, picking up a Grammy in the process.
For an act whose meteoric rise is the result of inspired, genre mashing innovation, delivering a follow-up might prove a daunting task – with many sleepless nights spent on where next to push the boundaries. But then Linkin Park aren't about innovation or boundary pushing.
The L.A. sextet's status as hard working, clean living, multi-million selling heroes of nu-metal is based on meticulous refinement of its technologically aware, hip hop savvy, formula. Limp Bizkit, and Nine Inch Nails before them, drew up the blueprint. Linkin Park turned it into a guaranteed source of ubiquitous radio hits. Though rarely as applauded as originality, it's a talent not to be sniffed at.
Understandably then, with the formula so refined, Meteora, the product of two years of intense and painstaking labour, sticks rigidly to it. And for once, that's no bad thing.
As sure as the tempered verses are the quietly rapped calm before the gut churning industrial storm, the potential singles line-up, with bespectacled screamer Chester Bennington delivering a bankable hook every time he attempts to burst a blood vessel.
If a micron less instant than previous benchmarks 'In The End' and 'One Step Closer', then 'Don't Stay' and 'Easier To Run''s liquid/jack hammer guitars and faint scratching offer reassuring familiarity until the drug-strength punch lines take effect. And while recording 40 different choruses for 'Somewhere I Belong' might be excessive and betray an uncomfortably clinical approach to emotions and music, the finished article is undeniably everything a Linkin Park song should be.
Miraculously, given the similarity of the design, Meteora avoids being a stagnant retread of Hybrid Theory. There have been some subtle modifications. 'Faint' and 'Lying On The Floor''s headlong charges benefit from Bollywood strings. 'Nobody's Listening''s similarly spiced hip hop, provides a mystical and much needed respite from the metallic barrage. Meanwhile, the album's overall demeanour is one of considered reflection; Mike Shinoda's rhymes take an older and wiser view; inevitable venting choruses are more eerily controlled explosions than venom-spitting catharsis.
None of which amounts to much more than the development of theme and resolution of issues that marks any good sequel. But it's enough. How long they can keep the formula productive, before the copies start coming out faded, is debatable. If Meteora's any indication, though, their sleepless nights are still a good way off.
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