Album Review: "Minutes to Midnight" - Linkin Park (2007)

Tonight, we go from one Rick Rubin-produced album to another.

Linkin Park's third offering was touted in reviews as something unlike their first two mega-successful albums, "Hybrid Theory" and "Meteora", both which I picked up more out of curiosity than anything else. To my ears, both of those efforts had a few interesting moments, for certain, but were mostly unremarkable. I decided to try this one out because I thought that with Rubin at the helm and the "this isn't the same old Linkin Park" advance press, it could really put this band over the top for me, but it didn't. The half-decent tunes sound either like Avril Lavigne could have done them (Leave Out All The Rest) or the record company told them to write a hit (Shadow Of The Day), and the angry tracks don't even come close to the memorable "Crawling" or the addictive "Numb". Making matters worse, everything except the last track clocks in a radio-friendly four minutes or less and excluding interludes, there's at best 38 minutes of music on this disc.

Now it's not all bad, and a couple of tracks like the closing "The Little Things Give You Away" will deservedly find themselves on the Best Of release that will inevitably follow Linkin Park's next album, but with "Minutes to Midnight", you're looking at about one mildly interesting moment for every three minutes of, well, meh. That still won't stop it from selling truckloads, but I'm just happy I only paid $11 for this coaster. And next time I hear something described as "screamo" by the guy working cash at Best Buy, I'll know to stay away from it.

Overall rating: 3.75/10