What, exactly, made Linkin Park the biggest selling act in America last year? The stilted nods to hip-hop culture? The rather dated electronic trim? Or the stadium-filling rock choruses that, bellowed loud enough, transcend all the contemporary trickery that surround them?
As you might've guessed, our money's on the latter. And here's the proof. 'Reanimation' is that self-conscious status symbol beloved of the nu-metal elite: a remix album. This is what Linkin Park sound like with much of their guitar thrust removed and what they fondly imagine are experimental tendencies pushed into the foreground…Not great, essentially.
Overseen by the band's Mike Shinoda - more of a fresh-faced young entrepreneur than a rapper, if truth be told - 'Reanimation' is a weirdly homogenous product. The remixers and collaborators may have been plucked from nu-metal's A-list (bits of Korn, Orgy, The Deftones and Staind), hip-hop's B-list (Kutmasta Kurt, Chali 2Na of Jurassic 5, Pharoahe Monch, The X-Ecutioners), God Knows Where (Backyard Bangers, Mickey P, Amp Live anyone?) or Hell (Kelli Ali, formerly of Sneaker Pimps). Nevertheless, most of the 236 tracks sound largely identical.
The dominant sound is of flickering sequencers and heavy-handed synth-pomp which showcases Linkin Park's keen interest in the work of Depeche Mode, but also often leaves them sounding about as cutting-edge and dangerous as Jesus Jones. It's a sound which gave occasionally interesting texture to the songs on their 'Hybrid Theory' debut but which, with much of the guitar noise peeled away, sounds unforgivably weedy. When a rapper turns up, they don't help matters much either.
Kutmasta Kurt and Motion Man half-heartedly try to turn 'In The End' (here retitled 'Enth E End', cleverly) into a hip-hop track but, as Motion Man raps around Chester Bennington's original chorus, it's plain these are songs unusually resistant to change. Bennington's voice doesn't gel with anyone cool, really, and it's significant that one of the more successful tracks - 'Kyur4 Th Ich', given a cod-Chemical Brothers makeover by the band's DJ, Joe Hahn - is largely instrumental. By the end, Shinoda is piling on the strings and drafting in Staind's Aaron Lewis to duet with the hapless Bennington on a bombastic version of 'Crawling' - sorry, 'Krwling'.
What's most galling, though, is that a record that purports to be adventurous is actually deeply conservative. Practically everyone performs a kind of mitigated surgery on Linkin Park - turn guitars down, turn synths up - without ever really messing them up. And the band get away with their songs, their vocals and, perhaps, their egos intact, but still manage to have their power significantly diluted. A lot of opportunities missed, then, and a strikingly joyless hour of music all round.
