Chartattack.com
Let's face it. The pressure is on Linkin Park right now to match Meteora's record sales with those of their breakthrough album Hybrid Theory, which has sold over 14 million copies and counting. The questions here are: can Meteora go multi-platinum and is Linkin Park's new music just as good as their old music? While the band does experiment more, most noticeably with the beats and sampling, they are still rap-metal experts. The dual vocals over heavy groove riffs and head-nodding rhythms are as fluid as ever. I do wish MC Mike Shinoda would lay off rhyming such basic words that sometimes add an unsavory cheesiness to the music.
However, Meteora is just as good as Hybrid Theory, and don't worry, while the softy first single "Somewhere I Belong" would have you believe otherwise, there's definitely no abundance of light and fluffy tracks here.