MUSIC REVIEW
Unafraid of Altering a Winning Formula
Chad Batka for The New York Times
Linkin Park, with Chester Bennington, left, and Mike Shinoda, playing its early songs along with its newer ones at Madison Square Garden on Friday.
By JON PARELES
Published: February 6, 2011
Many a band promises to reinvent itself. Few have done so as thoroughly as Linkin Park, which played Madison Square Garden on Friday night. Its 2010 album, “A Thousand Suns,” is strikingly different from the music that made Linkin Park a blockbuster band in the early 2000s, when it was a major instigator, or perpetrator, of rap-rock. At Madison Square Garden, Linkin Park was like two bands sharing a stage: the old hard-riffing rap-rock band and its newer, statelier, electronics-loving successor.
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On its debut album, “Hybrid Theory,” in 2000 Linkin Park devised a canny balancing act. Chester Bennington sang, and Mike Shinoda rapped. The music switched between power-chorded but melodic grunge and hip-hop stomps (adding low-end rock-guitar crunch). The lyrics pivoted between bitter insecurity (usually the melodic parts) and back-to-the-wall defiance (usually the raps). Wounded, aggressive and overwhelmingly self-absorbed, the songs honored countless adolescent mood swings and sold millions of albums.
“A Thousand Suns” (Warner Brothers) shifts both sound and subject matter. Keyboards and percussion, not guitars, are in the foreground; somber marches and quasi-tribal beats largely replace hard rock. Songs expand with multiple sections; the arrangements are thickly layered. Mr. Shinoda does more singing too.
Instead of Linkin Park’s old first-person rants and plaints, “A Thousand Suns” mulls something larger: the extinction of humanity. Its title comes from the Manhattan Project physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, who quoted the Bhagavad Gita after viewing atomic-bomb tests. Video screens above the band showed a mushroom cloud during “The Catalyst,” with its refrain, “We’re a broken people living under loaded gun.”
The album is part monument, part folly, but it’s a brave step for a band that already had its winning formula. “Once you have the theory of how the thing works/Everybody wants the next thing to be just like the first,” Mr. Shinoda taunted in “When They Come for Me.”
For this concert the Garden had a standing-room section upfront. It spawned a mosh pit as Linkin Park started the concert with a blast of older rap-rock.
Then the band reconfigured itself with keyboards and drums for newer songs like “Blackout.” It wasn’t entirely a break from the past; Linkin Park does have older keyboard-centered material. But when it played songs like “Numb” and “Breaking the Habit” alongside newer ones from “A Thousand Suns,” keyboards loomed where guitar chords used to charge in.
A few fans gamely kept moshing even when the tempos slowed. But the roar of sing-alongs resumed when Linkin Park reached back again to blunter, decade-old songs like “Papercut” and “Crawling.” (The concert is to be telecast on Feb. 18 on the Fuse cable channel.)
Linkin Park had a style-shifting postscript. As the arena emptied after the finale, the snarling “One Step Closer,” the sound system played a bluegrass version of the same song. Would fans be moshing to that someday?
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