the posting hour '24 04: that linkin park album
you knew this was coming, but maybe you didn't see it happening quite this way.
…hey, this is fair game, it leaked on monday!
i: from zero (intro)
the new linkin park album from zero has released by now; today, actually, if everything goes to plan. i’ve gone on at length about the first single, their first live performance and emily armstrong as their new primary vocalist in my previous article on the band, so go check that out if you want any serious discussion on those topics. right now we’ll be talking about the album as a whole, and we’ll be getting straight into it, because of all possible openings, i didn’t think linkin park would come back with a dad joke and use the opening song of their album to explain said dad joke.
for those wondering about the album title, there’s a double entendre present here. the two meanings are both going to be discussed at length in this article. the surface meaning is reading the title as it’s written; the implication is that after seven years out of the industry and with a pretty radically different line-up, linkin park are choosing to restart from nothing in the wake of chester bennington’s suicide (alongside rob bourdon’s departure and brad delson’s refusal to tour, though of course no one in the band has commented on that). you might think critically for one second and think “hey, it’s not exactly starting from zero when you have a huge legacy of branding, franchising and are generally quite possibly the youngest truly AAA rock band in the world“… and you’d be right! but that discussion is for later.
the other meaning is reading the title as ‘from xero‘, a joke based on the fact that when mike shinoda first formed what would become linkin park, before chester joined and when vocalist mark wakefield was the contrasting presence, they called themselves xero. their demo songs are easy to find and even accessible on streaming services thanks to the hybrid theory 20th anniversary release, where they were featured as deluxe tracks. and the intro decides to interrupt its own stock choral vocals to include studio chatter from emily armstrong asking shinoda about the album title, saying “ohhhh, wait, your fir-“ before cutting straight into the emptiness machine, thus explaining the double meaning and framing it as a joke.
this intro is a very weird start for a linkin park album. compare this to other album intros they’ve done like foreword, wake, and the requiem. these previous intros are mostly decently short, but importantly they all play into the themes and sounds of their album while refusing to break kayfabe. foreword from meteora is just 10 seconds of rain and hammers that leads seamlessly into don’t stay. wake from minutes to midnight leads seamlessly sonically into given up and its title links thematically to the grave being dug on the closer, the little things give you away, where the whole album is about death broadly, minutes to midnight as a title itself invoking the doomsday clock. the requiem from a thousand suns is an honest-to-god overture and not an overture like how most shitty prog rock bands write a shallow opener to serve as an overture; this is a genuine collage of sounds, lyrics and melodies from almost every song across the album and is deathly dark in subject while sounding sun-blasted with massively studio-altered vocals from mike.
all these previous intros were very commmitted to setting up their albums in an immersive manner, but what does from zero (intro) say about its namesake album? from my perspective, that there will be a lot of linkin park signifiers that this is still the same band but without the attention to detail and the commitment to dramatic stakes that made every linkin park album so good. and like, i could basically end my thoughts there because that’s the thesis established but i’m going to run through this whole thing with you all in just a moment!
but first, i do also want to talk about this album as an independent piece. any piece of art, no matter how enslaved to nostalgia and capitalism it is, deserves that much.
ii: from xero
from zero is a more-or-less competent recreation of a bunch of different linkin park sounds, but with significantly less polish than most of their previous albums. i’m pretty sure i mentioned it last time, but part of why every single linkin park hook is the stickiest motherfucker around is because chester bennington and mike shinoda did actual 9 to 5’s if not longer together specifically focusing on polishing the hooks to a mirror sheen, sometimes writing HUNDREDS of variations just to find The One that would make a smash hit. it’s old-school disciplined songwriting, an approach you’d find straight out of the brill building in the mid-20th century and one that just works.
i’m willing to bet that this never happened with armstrong because there are some choruses here that just whiff it. stained is the first to come to mind; there’s still a rock palette in this song but the vocal line emily sings is straight out of the overly dramatic trump-era pop lorde-alikes, especially with the melisma on the word ‘sta-a-a-a-a-a-ined‘. it’s a grating melody that really doesn’t fit in at all with the type of melodic contour linkin park used to use. the same goes for what is easily the worst song here, over each other, where the chorus line morphs into an even uglier pop style, the imagine dragon, even infecting the verses. which is a shame when this song arguably has the best bridge on the album, ruthlessly cut short as it is. the closer, good things go, also ends up a bit amorphous, where the verse line is catchier than the chorus. all of this isn’t to account for the choruses that are copied from other shinoda songs, like heavy is the crown pilfering from his vain attempt at a solo hit, already over; or the songs that emily can’t quite sing, like how cut the bridge and the final chorus on good things go are just so slightly out of her range, leading to a pretty ugly holler showing up there.
shinoda doesn’t really take any of the choruses, but while we’re talking about delivery, there’s another problem worth dissecting here. shinoda is a rapper and singer with a pretty limited range. his biggest strengths were always as a songwriter and businessman, which is why with a band who could execute on his vision and a stunner frontman like bennington, his weaknesses on the mic never really needed to show behind a surprising amount of vocal charisma or were crammed in between a bunch of other stunner moments. emily armstrong is not chester, and while she does demonstrate some moments of variety, she really doesn’t get to explore that much; i’m sure sweeter moments like the first chorus of overflow could’ve been taken advantage of way more instead of getting two of mike’s worst delivery styles yet recorded. casualty, leaning into the band’s more hardcore-styled songs like victimized and war, sees mike doing this…… what can only be described as shouting? i guess? whatever it is, it’s mike trying to imitate a lot of his post-hardcore idols like refused and coming up utterly short. his verses on overflow are somehow worse, as to utterly date that song’s huge trip hop stylings, he has this awful sing-song bro-ey affect that feels like he sucked the blood out of mac miller and got him to rap. it is at turns interesting (i assumed shinoda just didn’t listen to any west coast rap from after the mid-90s) and horrendous.
now, i do want to supplicate some fans who might be reading this and wondering what i even liked about this album, because there were some bits i did enjoy! the emptiness machine still has an incredible hook, cut the bridge has some intriguing sound design, overflow going for the absurdly big and desolate sound design sees the band at the closest they’ve been to the peak of their electronic days, and there are some details strewn about which are classic lp stuff. my favorite is on casualty where for just a bar transitioning to the final chorus, there’s this really aggressive electronic texture that just HITS right. the intro to stained with that drilling synth is a notable runner-up. but now we have to return to criticism, albeit of a different stripe.
there are so many moments on from zero which see shinoda quoting himself, to an extent that no other linkin park album had truly demonstrated prior to this point. i’ve already discussed the harmonic similarities between the emptiness machine and guilty all the same in my previous article, but after that there tends to be at least one moment per song that is functionally identical. hell, sometimes it’s a whole song, and those are the worst moments on the album.
cut the bridge’s verses with shinoda rapping over almost exclusively a straightforward snare beat deliberately evokes bleed it out. heavy is the crown is literally just a worse remake of faint, made ten seconds longer because emily armstrong needed to prove she could do a long scream like chester’s notoriously difficult 17-second scream on given up. overflow has the nebulously big feel and minimal instrumentation of new divide. two faced is just figure.09 with the bridge from place for my head slapped onto it.
alongside that, the intro isn’t the only place where studio chatter got left in to explicitly break kayfabe and wink to the audience. continuing the theme of being the worst song on the album, over each other ends with shinoda telling armstrong to put her screaming pants on before transitioning to casualty, the Super Heavy Song TM. two faced has a couple of pointless remarks left in at the end. overflow literally ends with a sample from the xero demo tape, which for an album that only just breaches the half-hour album does a surprising amount to break the flow between it and two faced. igyeih has a sample from the hybrid theory ep too, so that curio doesn’t end up forgotten.
which leads us to the final song, good things go, a bizarre little thing that is one of the band’s more confusing closers. it takes that status primarily due to its very last moments, where we hear a fade clearly designed to transition perfectly into the choral vocals on the intro. this is one of the most puzzling things about this album. not only does this not happen on any previous record of theirs, but like. okay. hang on.
if you’re trying to establish this new line-up and era of linkin park as coming from nothing but establishing itself as a force alongside the original band, why are we looping back to the start where we’re coming from nothing? why is the promised creative trajectory for this band an ouroboros? are linkin park doomed to live in a perpetual cycle of sound, endlessly re-arranging the toys they’d made into fanfiction-esque fights, approaching their music without the seriousness and dedication that they had demonstrated in their past and more as a set of toys to fuck around with?
and like. after everything i’ve said, you might think i hate this album, and while i do hate the circumstances that have led to it existing, i actually don’t hate it itself. it is, more than anything, uninterestingly competent at what it does. i relistened to this shit a bunch and not just because i knew i’d get eyeballs for talking about it on the day of release. and yeah, there are absolutely some technical problems here too; i question the choice to have new (and boring) drummer colin brittain co-produce the album when frankly shinoda and veteran 00s rock mixer neal avron could’ve handled the job just fine, but most of the other problems are likely from the leaked copy of the album presenting mp3 files in various bit rates, some of which i’d say are pretty much unacceptable (cut the bridge at 128kbps is a damn shame).
ultimately, the thing from zero reminded me of most wasn’t even a previous linkin park album, or indeed an album at all. it was alien: romulus.
iii: from 0 (outro)
i’ve been a fan of the alien franchise for quite a while now. i’ve finally taken the chance this year to try watch all the movies (not the avp movies though, lol). i still haven’t finished alien resurrection or watched any of alien covenant, but between watching alien at a decently young age, my being a massive fan of the metroid series which might as well be a straight-up adaptation and my general love for media that engages in science fiction and gender, this series is ingrained into me. thus, i obviously went to see alien romulus in theatres, and i’ve been thinking about it for a bit since i went to see it.
alien romulus is not a movie that benefits from that extended thought. much like how aliens had james cameron swerving away from the horror and deliberate abstraction the original movie presented in favour of butts-in-seats action schlock with a bloated runtime and just enough textual meaning to quieten the nerds, romulus is once again a swerve into mainstream trends puppeteering the alien franchise, this time working in the legacy sequel mould.
you’ve seen this tale a thousand times before. an old franchise needs some juice to justify warner bros or some other dipshits owning the intellectual property, and the cult fanbase is present to enough of a degree that a sequel with enough reified signifiers that This Is Of The Franchise will make decent money and suck people’s attention away from the latest worker abuse these companies perpetuate. the best of these are made on artists’ terms and deliberately puncture their own signifiers, like the matrix resurrections; the worst ones end up feeling like their existence is a mockery of the franchise, like the jj abrams star wars movies.
romulus isn’t the clusterfuck of a rise of skywalker, but it commits a lot of sins akin to that movie. one of the chief ones is decontextualising a lot of individual renowned elements of the movies they are supposedly functioning as a tribute towards. the parentage reveal in rise of skywalker is an immediately obvious example, where rey being a palpatine makes no sense within the emotional throughline of her character, actively contradicting the lightly challenging character work rian johnson attempted with rey in the last jedi. we start in that franchise on a sand planet to echo the original movie and that’s it; we up the scale of the death star so we have a similar threat to destroy that echoes the original trilogy and so on and so forth.
similarly, as an example, in alien romulus, the new android character, andy, saves our main character rain carradine by killing some xenomorphs and ends up uttering with a stutter, “get away from her, you bitch!“, which in context feels like absolute fucking delirium. i’ve made my complaints and criticisms of aliens very apparent just a few paragraphs ago, but that line, when ripley says it during the final conflict of that movie, is one of the movie’s few lines that’s loaded with meaning regarding what gender means in this world. ripley is a person who has a complicated relationship with gender on all sides as evidenced in all the movies, and yet she chooses to lean into an instinct framed as motherhood, protecting newt from an attack against the xenomorph queen. there is a visceral line of subtext underlined here, but as for its use in romulus? this line says nothing about anything except that alien is a franchise where you’re expected to get away from her, you bitch.
this is where we need to talk about the lyrics on from zero. it’s not going to be pretty.
the emptiness machine is where problems start almost immediately. i have no problem with vague lyrics, but here the vagueness feels almost like a scapegoat. it’s very much framed as giving your all to an institution that doesn’t care, which in the context of linkin park plays out one of two ways: a song in which devoted scientologist emily armstrong acts out against her cult when her mum leads their legal harassment office, or it’s mike singing about an industry that sucks his soul as he’s gleefully given to it and commodified himself via it for over twenty years. it’s not a good look, and again, it’s hard to get much interpretation out of the song that doesn’t inescapably turn inwards towards the band themselves. no one here has the life of chester to draw on and there isn’t a conceptual framework or storytelling device outside of linkin park’s comeback story that’s being used here. again, the very title of the thing is an inward reference.
even on songs that aren’t fundamentally about the band, the subject matter is so vague as to mean nothing. what kind of character is cut the bridge about? because of the diffuse imagery mike launches everywhere with his meandering raps, i genuinely can’t follow what the subject matter of this song is and what kind of character we’re supposed to be following. over each other is at least focused in imagery due to the syllabic limitation of being an emily solo joint, but is this album really the place for an utterly generic relationship song?
like, one of the few lyrical ideas with any follow through on the album is the duality between light and dark, for god’s sakes! linkin park have rarely if ever been a lyrical band, but even the vague angsty songwriting on the first two albums had performances that sold these massive feelings, whereas shinoda and armstrong are just not equipped for this, especially without the studio glitching that helped blend shinoda into the instrumentals. and then the most ridiculous line of the album comes on heavy is the crown, with mike saying he’s tired of explaining what the joke is when half this fucking album is explaining jokes! hell, that’s how it starts!
…
the cover of from zero has two main elements: the band logo and a lot of goopy pink water on a metal background. now, i don’t really know what’s going on with the latter; mike shinoda had a love affair with NFTs when they had any value whatsoever but seemed to have learned his lesson from the terrible meteora 20 videos and not used any large image models for the cover. but the logo is interesting, because it also does a bit of band storytelling. the band logo near their original end had the LP surrounded by a hexagon, the six sides representing the six members of the band. this got redesigned during the grieving period with a side missing with bennington dead. the new logo has the LP signage connected at four points to show the four old band members still involved with the project in some capacity, surrounded by a circle.
to make the implication blatantly clear, linkin park is framed in a big O, unable to stop eating its own tail for inspiration while claiming underdog status as arguably one of the biggest ever rock bands. and for a group who used to trailblaze, who never really repeated themselves, that’s really quite sad to see. my initial assessment compared this album to a reunion fall out boy, and while the generic pop rock numbers do sonically echo save rock and roll and american beauty / american psycho, this sort of desperate shrunken pandering is really more akin to so much (for) stardust. my love for the original band will never die, but this new incarnation are unfortunately hitting zero for xero.
two more posting hours are planned for the year: the normal december edition which is hopefully coming around the start of the month, and then a year-end edition going over some of my favourite art both that i first found and that released this year. see ye then.
-cas