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Meteora
03/11/2003 3:00 PM, Yahoo! Music
Ken Micallef
"I want to heal/I want to feel that there is somewhere I belong!" screams Linkin Park's Chester Bennington and, boy, do we want him to find somewhere, anywhere to go. Some believe that this crassly commercial band of rap-metal wreckers named themselves Linkin Park as a simple marketing ploy, knowing that they would benefit from having their product alphabetically positioned next to that of their heroes, Limp Bizkit. Not surprisingly, Linkin Park's latest blockbuster is a blatant reworking of rap and metal cliches (perfected on the sophomore Reanimation), its only creativity being its scary production. Meteora is robotic and clinical, with emotional colors ranging from mad to upset to madder to whining. The tinny beats are as antiseptic and non-grooving as armadillo sex. The rhyming lyrics and rumbling, bumbling guitars are standard plug-in rap-metal fodder, as interchangeable and uniform as MacDonald's cheeseburgers. What impresses most is the sound of the album, which is more mechanized and sequenced than a million U.K. dance records. The music is so compressed and Pro Tools-clean that you expect it to explode at any moment and MC Mike Shinoda's fake raps to become real cries of pain. "Session," for example, is all neural tension and clogged blood vein distortion, a good idea of what it must feel like to inhabit Keanu Reeve's Matrix character during meltdown. The lyrics do offer endless comic relief though: "I've let myself become lost inside of you/These thoughts inside of you/Giving up a part of me/I've let myself become you."
Who says demon possession isn't real?
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