Shaking Through
Rap-rock, nu-metal, whatever you want to call it, the ground that Linkin Park treads is clearly a restrictive patch of turf. Okay, that's not an entirely fair assessment: After all, it can be argued (with some exceptions) that there are no bad genres -- just talentless practitioners. Still, as the Korns and Papa Roaches of the world -- to say nothing of the Limp Bizkits -- keep proving, the bar for the genre is set relatively low enough so that when a band exhibits even a modicum of melody, a smidgen of songwriting, it's seen as a major step forward. Such was the case with Linkin Park's 2000 debut Hybrid Theory, a populist, mall-ready disc of packaged post-teen angst whose sprightly mix of sour subject matter and sweet pop instincts propelled songs like "Crawling" and "In the End" into the modern-rock/MTV stratosphere. But three years later, that album's surprising moments -- the dual vocal approach of Chester Bennington and Mike Shinoda, the family friendly melodicism undergirding such rote snarls as "Shut up when I'm talking to you!" (from "One Step Closer") -- have clearly outlived their sell-by date. Meteora, the fresh-faced septet's second proper release (not counting 2002's appallingly uneven remix package Reanimation), treads further down the well-worn grooves of the genre, sanding them down into a rut. The freshness of the familiar approach gone, the embarrassing pedestrian lyricism of songs like "Somewhere I Belong" and "Easier to Run" becomes more glaringly apparent. The regurgitation of stock life-is-hard tropes by millionaires is off-putting enough in the hands of less-accomplished nu-metalers; coming from a group whose debut offered a glimmer of hope for the expansion of the genre's boundaries, such creative laziness is all the more disappointing.
