Notes about the release from LP:
Seriously I had high hopes and as burned out on LP as I am, I really do enjoy their music when it comes on. I'm quite fine with new music directions if they're good. I wouldn't want Hybrid Theory 2 or Meteora 2. (Didn't we already have those anyway?) But like Marilyn Manson's last CD where he decided to 'experiment' or whatever the fuck he decided to do, this CD is a steaming load of crap. There's nothing on this CD that I listen to and think 'wow they are talented' or 'thats different and cool'. It's not like NIN's Ghosts where although I didn't really like it, I could at least respect what it was and it was good at being what it was. There's maybe 2 or 3 songs that are 'ok' and could be mood music I guess. The rest is just fucking garbage that a band by any other name would have been laughed at for submitting. I'm all for alternative, artistic and different directions, but I'm not afraid to call suckage when it's suckage. This is suckage. I dare say it's barely worth downloading and certainly not worth buying. It's really a waste of 48 minutes of your life. Color me severely disappointed.We were not making an album. For months, we'd been destroying and rebuilding our band. The experiments that resulted filled the studio hard drive with diverse, abstract sounds. Amorphous echoes, cacophonous samples, and handmade staccato merged into wandering, elusive melody. Each track felt like a hallucination. We didn't know if any of those unorthodox ideas could be incorporated into a traditional album, but we knew we didn't want our next album to be predictable. [Note: Why does it always seem when a band is about to put out a shit album they attribute it to 'not wanting to sound predictable' or 'not wanting to do another version of..' whatever made them famous?] Sitting together in the same studio where we made our first album, all six of us voiced a commitment to going out on a limb, to making something truly daring. We asked ourselves: were we all earnestly willing, more than ever before, to abandon the precepts of commercial ambition in pursuit of what we believe to be honest art? [Note: Buy some fucking glitter and crayons to design a craptastic cover to a better CD please!] The inclination to begin writing conventional songs for a conventional album came and went. [Note: In other words, we couldn't come up with a good song to save our lives, so we'll just say we did but threw them out in the name of art!] The temptation to adjust our creative vision to fulfill expectations beyond our studio walls yielded to the audacious ambition of what we hoped to achieve as a band. The two years of making 'A Thousand Suns' marked our exhilarating, surrealistic, and often challenging journey into the creative unknown. On the eve of its completion, this body of work, assembled through unconscious inspiration and unmitigated exertion, has revealed to us notions both stirring and surprising [Note: Surprising at how badly we wasted two years]. The album's personified imagery is neither dogma nor political premeditation. The emergent themes and metaphors illuminate a uniquely human story. 'A Thousand Suns' grapples with the personal cycle of pride, destruction, and regret. In life, like in dreams, this sequence is not always linear. And, sometimes, true remorse penetrates the devastating cycle. The hope, of course, springs from the notion that the possibility of change is born in our most harrowing moments. Enjoy the music.
1/5
PS: The longest song on the CD is the amazingly repetitive and sucky "The Catalyst".