Album Review: Linkin Park - Living Things

Linkin Park's last project, A Thousand Suns, was a wildly ambitious, chaotic and disjointed affair. It polarised fans but produced some of the most interesting work this band has done in years.

Living Things is a return to a more recognisable Linkin Park. Even as it incorporates some of the elements that the band introduced on the last album, the big-hitting choruses of old and more traditional song structures should bring some of the band's disenfranchised fans back into the fold. Songs such as In My Remains and Lost In The Echo tick trademark Linkin Park boxes. Any album that gives rapper/multi-instrumentalist Mike Shinoda such a prominent vocal role on the very first track as Lost In The Echo does here is bound to satisfy a lot of people.

But perhaps the biggest change A Thousand Suns has brought to this new Linkin Park sound is the prominence of the brooding electronica that works as a foundation to most of these songs. Even the big ticket guitar scorchers, such as the explosive first single Burn It Down, have been built on bleeps and shimmering waves of synths.

At times the overall sense of the album becomes oppressive and difficult to really sink into, but few modern rock bands can write a massive chorus like Linkin Park. It's just a shame that the band's efforts to incorporate  the new with the old has meant that the more experimental elements of A Thousand Suns have been shaved off into something far more palatable for the mass market.