Linkin Park
Living Things

The first two Linkin Park albums are bad. This is an extremely outdated observation, but it should be printed on flyers and dropped in the mailbox of every Italian family. They are bad. At the turn of the 2000s, they enshrine a genre that had already been invented and thrashed in the most polymorphic variants for at least five years, in a form that was even better handled by bands like Limp Bizkit. There is no logical or historiographic reason why Linkin Park was initiated into the sanctuary of cosmopolitan idols, as they present themselves as a heap of pus and pubescent hormones in the form of a nu-metal band, ready to make thirteen-year-olds scream with joy, in whom the band members themselves seem to identify. Soulless guitars, electronic sounds courtesy of the Windows audio sample, screaming for its own sake that seems to say "I'm an adult, I’m so cool".

It's precisely from these embarrassing sound frequencies that the band feels the need to abandon their status as eternal Peter Pans and move towards more mature realizations. This is the case with the embarrassing "Minutes To Midnight", which seems to relate to rock like Taylor Swift does to country. With "A Thousand Suns", however, Linkin Park manages to sketch an almost dignified profile for themselves, with people even showing they know how to compose songs, which in some cases even succeed in being noticed, escaping their nature of background noise during our endless games of "Minesweeper". But just when it seemed legitimate to expect something more, along comes "Living Things". The layers of concealer and shampoos aimed at masking pimples and high school dye jobs are replaced by t-shirts with flamboyant robots printed on them, tacky laser beams, and puerile existential phrases that leave a certain sense of embarrassment. Still not clear what we're talking about? Look at the album cover. Every logical expression is demolished in just half an hour of songs, in favor of a syllogism that goes against any rationality, screaming with unseemly enthusiasm: "We spent years breaking out of our ridiculous teenage shell… it's time to go back" or better still: "We are pigs, let's stop sewing a lion's mane on ourselves and accept our reality as swine".

Fortunately, "Living Things", while being light years away from the half-successful attempt of "A Thousand Suns", doesn't have the same decency-destroying charge typical of "Minutes To Midnight" or "Hybrid Theory" either. It's simply a mediocre album and like every mediocre album, it features a couple of successful tracks, "Lies Greed Misery", which recovers the structure of the powerful "Wretches And Kings", building on it a valid alternative, albeit significantly inferior, "Victimized", which although focusing its substance on Bennington's screams, manages not to fall into the typical tacky and ridiculously hard piece like "Bleed It Out", and unequivocally annoying tracks, among which standout are "Roads Untraveled", which brings to mind the melodies typical of Catholic church celebrations (and we're talking about a band defined as metal), and "Powerless". But beyond the concept of mediocrity, of which this album seems to be an explanatory essay, there is another element that keeps alive the constant feeling that something is consistently wrong during the listening: a web of thick electronic sounds halfway between the monophonic tones of the "Nokia" and the compositions of the "Bontempi" keyboard, which cover each piece with a childish and nauseatingly romantic personality. Extremely illustrative in this sense are tracks like "Burn It Down", "Lost In The Echo", "I'll Be Gone", and "In My Remains", renewed hormonal outbursts, that make the mixer produce an infatuated teenager who sings at two in the morning: "baby, loving you is my destiny". Appreciable though not completely self-sufficient are "Castle Of Glass" and "Skin To Bone", sharing the same crescendo structure, and "Until It Breaks", which feels like a b-side of "A Thousand Suns".

No need to add more regarding an album that, the more it tries to convince us of its validity, the more it instills among the audience a tender compassion, like a kitten vainly attempting to climb a ladder, accompanied by a background stuffed with electric guitars.

Rating: 4/10