Linkin Park - 'New Divide'
It's got to be quite an intimidating task, being asked to provide soundtrack music for a film, even if it is the latest in the Transformers franchise. For starters, your music is going to be heard in some detail by people who have paid money to experience something which is entirely unrelated to your best efforts.
Then there's the question of what musical sounds you make. Do you use this as an opportunity to show off your cinematic side? To really experiment with your sound and come up with something that is entirely unlike what you normally do but which has been explicitly tailored to fit the images it will be used to soundtrack?
(. Which seems to be taking place in a volcano.)
Linkin have taken the admirable stance of changing what they do in no way whatsoever, letting the film come to them, rather than the other way around. It's the doomy, epic, huge Linkin Park of 'What I've Done' or 'Numb' rather than the comparatively party-jamming funkateering Linkin Park of 'Bleed It Out'.
Chester is once again howling his inner turmoil to an uncaring world from the top of some dark wind-blasted mountain while a storm tries to strike his bones from the surface of the Earth. This is what they do. This is clearly what they have been hired to do, and it suits a great big fighty movie rather well.
And the chorus goes to some surprising peaks, melodically, which is always welcome from a band who can occasionally just sit on one note for an entire song and then change the chords underneath.
Granted, it's perhaps not as completed a song as it could be, but they're hardly going to use their very best ideas for a Transfomers movie, now are they?
Download: Out now
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(Fraser McAlpine)
"Chester Bennington sounds like a more seasoned and mature singer than ever before"
"When the drums are pumped and the riffs are loud, I can more than deal with Chester Bennington's samey serenity prayers.
"
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