u/Ashamed-Duty-5063

I notice a few similarities from Rob's drumming on The Hunting Party, to other songs from other albums like :

1. The pattern on the prelude to the guitar solo on TLTGYA and the pattern on Drawbar

2. The drum outros of ALITS and Victimized

3. The pattern after the second chorus on Keys To The Kingdom and the bridge of In My Remains.

Is my mind playing tricks on me or are there other similarities I've missed?

I have always been a fan of Chester, and his style of singing was something I got attached to as a child, and I never stopped being in awe of his talents.

With that said, Chester was a human being, and had the occasional bad performance from time to time, you know, like every human singer in existence. It's also unfortunate that his voice did become a bit weak during the later years of his career.

Now does that mean that I hate Chester? Obviously not.

But when I see certain comments praising Chester, and then see those same accounts bashing Emily, it makes me mad because :

1. Emily has a completely different vocal range and timber to her voice. It's never going to sound the same. In fact, Chester singing the newer songs tailored to Emily's strengths would sound really awkward too, but I'd still enjoy it as it would have been his approach to a song fit for another singer, and he has done covers of songs by other bands and made it sound great. (Check out his rendition of Edie by The Cult, for example)

2. Chester's lungs had a much higher capacity than many of his male and female peers. As a result he could sustain multiple long notes on a single show effortlessly. Emily is much better in shorter bursts of energy, and brings a different intensity to the current shows.

3. A lot of the praise for Chester is based on heavily edited clips (and specific ones at that) that circulate on social media. One of the more ludicrous examples was an a-capella of New Divide played over the performance of Breaking The Habit at Rock Am Ring 2004. Like, what bro?

4. The nerve of people to say that "Chester would be rolling in his grave" as if they know him better than Mike, Brad, Rob, Dave and Joe is baffling on so many levels, it might as well be an abandoned car park in the Arkham Universe.

5. Chester WAS not Linkin Park. He was a part of it, and definitely an integral part of it, but he was not the entire band or brand. Why people think like this is beyond me, especially when we have the internet to explain basic concepts like these.

6. And the worst bunch of the lot, the people who never listened to the band after Hybrid Theory and Meteora. In some extreme cases I came across people who thought Meteora was just a rinse and repeat album and thus hated everything after Hybrid Theory.

Sorry for venting on a Saturday, but I feel like I had to do it right now (Fort Minor Reference y'all, whoop whoop!)

So this study here was conducted by Tebra, and multiple outlets like Revolver Mag and Metal Hammer started publishing headlines that read "Study shows Linkin Park is No.1 artist for stress relief".

Now, I personally have found a lot of relief and peace when listening to LP on multiple occasions since my childhood, but this study really does nothing to reinforce anything of substance, for multiple reasons :

1. The study was conducted across 1000 listeners based in the USA, which immediately implies that the rest of the world isn't factored into this research. For context, K-Pop is a huge chunk of the global industry but they are not mentioned in this article. T-Series, an Indian Bollywood music channel has 311 million subscribers on YouTube, 33-34 million shy of the United States' total population at the moment, and they're not mentioned. I won't even get into the lack of representation of Brazilian, Russian or Chinese music in this article.
2. The top 10 songs featured in the research are not from Linkin Park, or any other nu-metal band, nor do they belong to Adele and Taylor Swift, who apparently make the top 3 of the most listened artists on stress relief playlists.
3. The 1000 listeners were able to select multiple options for their choices of music, so people would have chosen a song like "Numb" or "In The End" just because it seemed familiar, rather than being an active fan of the band and listening to more LP songs as a whole.
4. From the study "Seven stress- and mental health-related search terms were used to surface relevant playlists, including "anxiety," "burnout," "calm down," "decompress," "destress," "overthinking," and "stress relief". Which is very much a novice approach to understanding what songs actually promote stress relief. Also, some playlists titles containing the word "Burnout" are in reference to either gym workouts or a classic racing game of the same name, while "anxiety" and "calm down" are the names of viral 2020s songs and playlists with their names may have absolutely nothing to do with topics pertaining to mental health and stress.

TL:DR; All in all, I love LP, and they have helped me through some tough times, but a study based on a survey of a 1000 people from one country and filtered through less than 10 keywords or phrases is not much of a conclusion for anything, and unintentionally trivializes the other aspects of the musical journey that Linkin Park have been on since 1996.

For what it's worth, seeing so many thousands of fans expressing how they've found solace through their music is always a great thing.

Just my 2 cents (or pennies, or paise) that no one asked for, but what do you guys think?

1. Verse 2 on I.O.U : The flow of each word is calculated and precise to a tee. Also, the X Men/ Logan references are just the icing on the cake. This song needs more love than it currently has right now.

2. Verse 2 on Lost In The Echo : This song is pretty energetic on its own, but the bars on this verse just makes you feel even more pumped up. My favorite line from this verse is "I can't C flat, it ain't my tone." Cheeky, but on point.

3. Verse 1 on Forgotten : The whole song is underrated, but Mike's flow on this verse is so unique compared to the rest of his discography.

4. & 5. Genius Bar : Yup. The entire song. Hard to choose a single verse from this song that is better than the other.

Living Things is a fantastic album, but of all the 8 studio albums, I feel like it has the most disjointed structure aka sequence of songs. 90 percent of the album's energy is concentrated in the first 7 songs, and then it comes crashing to a downturn at the beginning of Roads Untraveled.

https://preview.redd.it/ta9jpplm7wxg1.png?width=420&format=png&auto=webp&s=22741fff75b888a6d178032fab7729bc6064686b

Despite my love for Powerless, I don't feel it is a strong enough album closer to pick up the energy of the album and end it on a high note.

To me that's not the fault of Powerless, but how the album builds up to it before Tinfoil, which places a burden on the song that didn't need to be there in the first place.

So here's my idea of restructuring the album to keep the same songs and elements (possibly add an element or 2 from elsewhere) :

1. Lost In The Echo - Keeping the first 4 songs as is, because that 4 song run is flawless

2. In My Remains

3. Burn It Down

4. Lies Greed Misery

5. Skin To Bone - I feel this bridges the gap between Lies Greed Misery and Castle of Glass better than I'll Be Gone, plus listening to this after Roads Untraveled really brings the mood to a calm and I personally didn't feel that this track transitions well into Until It Breaks

6. Castle of Glass - Maybe some sound effect that transitions the last "for you to seee" harmonies which takes us to....

7. Until It Breaks
   - Remove Brad's acoustic vocals, ( I feel they belong more on One More Light)
   - Keep Mike's verses 1 and 2
   - Add the falsetto lyric-less chorus from the "Apaches" demo in between them
   - Then Mike's verse 3 followed by
   - Chester's chorus.
   - At the end, the line "Bring Me To Kingdom come" needs to be gradually down tuned & sped up with a record scratcher (not more than 20 seconds or so) which fades into....

8. Roads Untraveled - Keep the scratch intro that exists on the original album. The last "whoas" in the final chorus actually fade into a high note on the original song, so this could be tweaked slightly to be a sustain, that leads to....

9. I'll Be Gone - Now the energy picks up and the song is perfect as it is.

10. Victimized - The last guitar parts are high pitched enough to transition into

11. Tinfoil - No changes here

12. Powerless - Now the album closer doesn't just feel like it's lifting a heavy weight from the burden of 3 back to back soft sounding songs but continues a second chapter of the character from Victimized, feeling powerless after all that rage was vented out.

So that's my super unpopular take, with a fix absolutely no one asked for, but let me know what you think!