Kerrang!
A 'Collision Course' of success with Jay-Z and Linkin Park
The first thing you hear on this 25-minute album is Chester Bennington's voice, distinctly Caucasian, slightly whiny. "Where's my Frappuccino?" he asks, all nasal demand. "I ordered a f**king Frappucino." How cool, you think, that what is essentially a hip-hop album with extra guitars should begin with a demand not for b*tches or bling, but for a cup of coffee. What a playa.
Strange, then, that the only thing wrong with collision course, as an album, is its title, which doesn't fit becuase this six-song set - half a dozen linkin park numbers and a smattering of jay-z tracks married together - sounds both fluid and natural, with the sounds merging and completmenting each other perfectly. That this is so shouldn't really be a surprise. After all, Linkin park 'Hybrid Theory' wasn't simply the title of an album, but rather a modus operandi, a way of making music that defied categorisation. Except, perhaps, as being 'modern'. For those who concentrated only on the band's corporate leanings and lack of individual personality missed a trick here, because linkn park, in what they aim to do, are usally far ahead of the game.
There are some odd moments. Hearing the lyric '99 problems but a b*tch ain't one' on an album shared by a band whose lyrical stance is usually so defiantly unspecific seems like an illicit pleasure. There's also an accompanying documentary DVD, which is both boring and a little embarrassing, with the group trying just a touch too hard to ingratiate themselves with their new collaborator.
But it's the music that strikes hard, with a sense of real expertise and panache running throughout. Mike Shinoda, who it seems put in a lot of the groundwork here, has a real knack for this, turning something that might have been simply awful that sounds both fresh and oddly familiar. Songs (or parts of songs) such as 'Papercut' and 'Numb' are given fresh legs, and a band who only last year were being measured for their nu-metal coffin size have shown, again, that for them such boundaries only exist to be broken.
