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(More customer reviews)If you can believe it, this is the first review I've ever written for an album, despite being an amazon customer for years. Why? Because I'm just so damn disappointed in all the negative reviews of A Thousand Suns.
First of all, let me say that I'm not a lyrics person. What I take away from LP's music is a feeling, an emotion, and so far I gotta admit that I'm loving the feeling I get from this album. No, it is not like any of their previous works (though I think we all saw where they might be going as a band after MtM). No, it is not nearly as angry as Hybrid Theory. And no, it is not nearly as catchy as Meteora. So what the hell is it?
To me, it's a recovery album. This may be lost on some readers, but if i picture LP's albums as a man going through life, I see their early music as a very wounded and angry man. The catharsis in listening to those albums comes from realizing that not only does someone else out there hurt as much as you, someone out there may actually hurt even more. I revel in listening to those early CDs for that reason. When Reanimation came out, I saw a slightly more playful side to LP. The wounds were still there, but they were being examined now, looked at in an almost clinical, curious way. Minutes to Midnight disappointed me at first, I'll admit it. The wounded man was no longer angry, but I still was. It took me several looped listens to come to terms with the fact that he had moved on, and was beginning to let some of the old grudges go. It's not a tired album - far from it - but MtM does give one the sense that LP was getting tired of fighting all the time. That they were searching for solace.
A Thousand Suns, then, in my view, is Linkin Park's first glimpse of solace. Listening to it, I see the wounded man internalizing his anger differently now than in Hybrid Theory, taking the weight of his troubles on his own shoulders rather than throwing them onto others. A salve of sorts is applied to some of the old scars, though a few new cuts are evident too. It's not a happy album by any means, but it is peaceful, in a way only LP can make industrial noise sound. It's also not a simple album; I am sure that future listens will reveal even more about the music to me. But for now, I felt the need to let other hesitant buyers know that I trust LP pretty implicitly with my musical soul. Whatever journey they want to take me on, I'm willing to go for the ride. And I'm willing to grow up with them too, if that's what they ask of me.
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A Thousand SunsLimited Edition CD+DVD includes a 'making of the album' documentary & 'The Catalyst' music video.'A Thousand Suns'We were not making an album. For months, we'd been destroying and rebuilding our band. The experiments that resulted filled the studio hard drive with diverse, abstract sounds. Amorphous echoes, cacophonous samples, and handmade staccato merged into wandering, elusive melody. Each track felt like a hallucination. We didn't know if any of those unorthodox ideas could be incorporated into a traditional album, but we knew we didn't want our next album to be predictable. Sitting together in the same studio where we made our first album, all six of us voiced a commitment to going out on a limb, to making something truly daring. We asked ourselves: were we all earnestly willing, more than ever before, to abandon the precepts of commercial ambition in pursuit of what we believe to be honest art? The inclination to begin writing conventional songs for a conventional album came and went. The temptation to adjust our creative vision to fulfill expectations beyond our studio walls yielded to the audacious ambition of what we hoped to achieve as a band. The two years of making 'A Thousand Suns' marked our exhilarating, surrealistic, and often challenging journey into the creative unknown. On the eve of its completion, this body of work, assembled through unconscious inspiration and unmitigated exertion, has revealed to us notions both stirring and surprising. The album's personified imagery is neither dogma nor political premeditation. The emergent themes and metaphors illuminate a uniquely human story. 'A Thousand Suns' grapples with the personal cycle of pride, destruction, and regret. In life, like in dreams, this sequence is not always linear. And, sometimes, true remorse penetrates the devastating cycle. The hope, of course, springs from the notion that the possibility of change is born in our most harrowing moments. Enjoy the music. Linkin ParkCo-produced by Rick Rubin and Mike Shinoda.
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