5 AM Music Review

I confess, I've only purchased an album on the week it premiered once before - it was Audioslave's 2005 dud, Out of Exile. I'm wary of purchasing music I'm not already attached to. I had heard one song off of Linkin Park's new A Thousand Suns and it was neat, not an instant hit like New Divide, but rhythmically interesting, and besides, it's my birthday. A Thousand Suns is, in a nutshell, written specifically for dirkcjelli, full of the horror of politics and war. It mixes quotes from Oppenheimer, Savio, and King for good effect. The album has a very different feel than LP's previous work. Earlier albums were more metal, more up-tempo, and more about frustration and self-loathing. A Thousand Suns is more industrial trance and continues to interweave tracks together and repeat themes and lines from earlier tracks. It also features more seamless interchanges between singing and rap, with a guest voice singing the opening lines of the album and Chester and Shinoda both singing the recapitulation in Catalyst:

God save us, every one,
Will we burn inside the fires of a thousand suns
For the sins of our hand, the sins of our tongue,
the sins of our father, the sins of our young?