gorast

Discords are simply not the place for oldheads. I'm gonna make myself sound 1000 years old, but the pace of each channel is way, way too fast to keep up with - you're either right there, right that second, engaged in whatever conversation is happening, or you've missed out. No in between. ESPECIALLY for an official Discord centered around a band with a huge online presence like LP. The ephemeral nature of a Discord really bothers me, especially when you get little tidbits from the subjects of the server that are there and gone in an instant under a sea of shitposts because no one noticed that Mike posted something. The Nine Inch Nails Discord has this same problem - Trent, Atticus, and other band people will just drop in sometimes, and if you're not there for it, you better hope someone screencapped their comments, because finding them after the fact is basically hopeless. It's good for the younger fans, I suppose, to bask in an environment full of people in their age bracket rather than having to try and break through to the dinosaurs on here (me included) or, god forbid, the subreddit. But it's definitely not my preferred method of engaging in the community - I much prefer posting here once every seven months.

We'll at least get Live in Texas in full in the digital download/on streaming, which is a pretty good consolation prize.

If this image does in fact hold the full contents of the M20 box, I admit to being just a little bit disappointed that there doesn't appear to be a cool physical trinket like the laminate and cassette from HT20. Even so, a big-ass print of the Meteora wall alongside the three lithos is a great addition, and the 20th anniversary art is all gorgeous. Really emphasizes the contrast between the beige cover and blue...rest of the album's artwork. Makes me wonder why the cover ended up being beige instead of blue, but I've been thinking about that for like 17 years now so I guess it doesn't actually matter that much.

Not to be the Warner dickrider guy (again, I guess), but I'm pretty much completely sold on the contents of this one. Four full shows on DVD, Live in Texas on vinyl, a demo disc with seven BRAND NEW demos we've literally never heard of or about before, another show on vinyl...not sure that this tops HT20, and I'm not sure that anything really could given that Hybrid Theory is Hybrid Theory, but this seems like a hell of a follow-up to me. It's always seemed to me like vocal demos from the Meteora sessions are few and far between, so to actually get one of those and see it be the headliner of the box is sweet. Maybe one or two of the other ones will have vocals too! Who knows. We'll see! Did those product pages have any kind of art besides the one shown on page 2, like an image of the box or something? Given that this is coming out in two months, I feel like this is the right time for it all to go live - maybe it's just a day early or something and we'll get all that info tomorrow. Regardless, I'm stoked, this is a day one buy, it's a great day for the community. Best of all: Finally, Meteora on 1LP rather than split across two for literally no reason. Sanity prevails!

Really nice to hear bars again from Mike. In retrospect, three Dropped Frames volumes was probably the right call, because I got tired of the endless beats a while ago, and I'm not going to say anything about Mike's NFT fixation this year. This was a nice change of pace from all of that, even as short as it was.

LMAO. This was an insta-pass when it was revealed to be piss-yellow, SotD still being wrong just makes it even easier.

Hybrid Theory is fine, but MTM sucks shit. Yellow? Who the hell signed off on that color? Also, these big box retailers doing exclusive reprints is part of why the vinyl market is so comprehensively fucked right now. These are going to sit on shelves and waste away just like everything else Walmart is throwing into the vinyl ether. Ugh.

This still should not be on 2LP. 9 minutes a side, that's basically a workout, having to get up and flip it then swap it out that quickly.

The proper full link is on page 2. Here it is: https://www.dropbox.com/s/uwnl7kd1as8ggjq/The_Complete_Rosewood_Fall.zip?dl=0 That link will not go down, ever. I should probably just remove the link in the 2014 post.

Did we really just discover even more Hybrid Theory demos? Do those titles potentially correspond to things we've heard?

That's a shame, but this was such a goofy reissue anyway. Completely incongruent vinyl color, still inexplicably splitting a 36 minute album over four 12'' sides at 33rpm...none of that was gonna stop me from buying it, but come on, lol.

Wait what? What's this about someone uploading Rhinestone from the audition tape? Is it different from the Zomba/HT20 version we have?

Finally the good guys win.

It's not missing, it's at the very right edge. The colors just make it hard to see, and it butts right up against the white border.

The note about Kyle is kind of funny but also kind of like, I don't know, maybe a little cynical? Like, what would Kyle's goal be in not clearing CHB? He'd know he has zero leverage to demand a bigger cut for that song, so it's take whatever Warner offers or nothing, you know? He must know that this fanbase absolutely will not have any chill about Deftest and this 3-track sampler, though, lol. Any attempt to downplay it is utterly futile.

Some of this stuff you guys are suggesting has zero commercial value. I understand that a 20th anniversary box set is going to be aimed more towards diehards than the general public, but this stuff still has to, you know, sell. Making a $200 box set with stuff that's way too niche, or something insanely sprawling with every single potential variation of every HT track, isn't worth the cost. Especially when you drill down into some of these demos and think about how different they really are. The 6-track demo, for instance, has nothing substantially different from the demos we did end up getting. A replica of the 8-track demo, sure, maybe, given how directly it was acknowledged in the artbook, but all of those tracks are basically in this box anyway, plus now you're cutting some tracks out onto a separate CD, which pops up the manufacturing cost and makes each CD even sparser in terms of content. The exact versions from the 8-track? Not in every case, no, but putting 400 demos of every HT track in a box set like this is a waste of time for everyone but the .01% of the fanbase on this forum. The focus seemed to be on getting the really big variants onto this box - the LPU and Forgotten versions of Points are both distinct from the HT version, Carousel obviously has a very different vibe, SuperXero is different enough, Crawling has the rap bridge that changes the whole flow of the song. You compare those to what's not on here - Plaster variations, Dust Brothers, other alts of the songs that did make the cut - and you see that there's a threshold the demos had to meet to justify making the box. Part of Me feels like the only valid omission, which people have been saying for months. No one was upset that Plaster (mix 1 of 4) missed out. As for the Xero tape, it would have been nice to have the whole thing in the quality of RME. But look at what did make it - a professional studio recording of Rhinestone, the Chester version of Stick N Move, which, based on how the guys talk about that song, seems like the only version they can even stand. Fuse was out of the question from the start because of the sample and the inability to cut it out of the master track, so once you've broken up the tape, there's no reason to include an inferior version of Rhinestone and a version of Stick N Move they hate. That takes a physical reproduction of the Xero tape off the table. A reproduction of the 2-track HT demo would be redundant, but including just the sticker I could have seen being a nice addition. Chester's audition tape seems pretty unrealistic at this point - that's something the band will hold close to their hearts forever, and I'd be surprised if it ever, ever, EVER sees any official release. Maybe they think it's too close to commercializing Chester. Maybe they just want to keep something private, the way so little of the HT era is. Either way, I'm champing at the bit for it, but I doubt we'll ever see it. This box was not and never was about emptying the vaults. This box was about taking the entire Hybrid Theory era and summing it up for the big fans and for people who weren't even alive when HT came out. It's a convenient way to bundle up all those b-sides (a bunch of which do have actual value despite the denigration of live tracks in general - can't tell me those Docklands tracks don't rip, though I could take or leave the BBC ones), to open up the LPU vault for people who missed out and don't have the savvy to find those tracks elsewhere, and even after all that, they STILL threw us some bones with four tracks none of us had ever heard, and audio upgrades for the rest. Given the way the HT era has been mined to death in this fanbase, it's shocking to me that there was ANYTHING we had no clue about. More cynically, the Chester vault is finite. Warner will never get new material from Chester ever again. Emptying the vault, even for a major anniversary like this, is an unwise move. That audition tape is absolute gold, and they'll hold onto that until the end of time, I'll bet. I know this probably sounds like I'm some Warner shill, but we need to have some perspective about things like this. There are plenty of valid criticisms - the EU manufacturing errors in particular are outrageous, the weird way the vinyl was split between the big box and the vinyl box is pure money-grubbing by Warner, DVDs in 2020 are just goofy - but it is, actually, true that Warner didn't have to put this much effort. Tons of labels will just chuck out an anniversary release like the 2CD version and call it quits. The band put real care into this box, you can tell that they had a ton of input into what made it in, and they really did crack open the vault in a way I wasn't expecting. In a way, nothing will ever be enough, and I don't mean that in a derogatory way towards anyone - it's natural to want more from your favorite band in the world. I just think we need to have some more perspective on what we actually got, rather than what we didn't.

Thinking that "holy grail" material is about quality is missing the point. It's about digging out pieces of LP history that we hear about, things we can latch onto the broaden our understanding of the band. IMO, it doesn't matter that Pictureboard isn't the greatest song of all time or even really all that great - it's all about the mystery, the intrigue of this lost track that was mysteriously played once, that they did with Mark. Sometimes it feels like people intentionally misconstrue what the goal is here. No one's out here saying "Mark is better than Chester," "Mark's vocals have value because he's good," or any dumb shit like that. Obviously Mark is nothing compared to Chester, but isn't it enticing to hear material from an extremely young band, back when they basically had no clue what they were doing? If you love a band so much, it's only natural to want to see the whole timeline. The fervor when it comes to Mark material, I think, is further amplified simply because it's different - because it's not Chester, it's this other guy who was there first, who moved on. The Xero tracks have seeds of what LP became, but a lot of them are so different, and it's extremely intriguing to me to get more and more of that material. It's exciting, you know? And then, it's thrilling to imagine a Stick N Move scenario, where a Mark song survived long enough to become a Chester song, and then you can compare them, hear the evolution in real time. That's what annoyed me so much about this bizarre anti-Mark crowd - it's not about Mark vs. Chester, it's about hearing this wildly different permutation of a band we all love. It's entirely about the history, and that's the whole point. Don't get it twisted. To pop back on topic, that 3-track pre-Xero tape sampler is the new grail IMO, if only to hear Deaftest and see what that one's about. Dialate and RME are probably the same as what we've already heard, but I want to see the artwork, if there is any. That feels like something that will never, ever come out secondhand, though. There might have always only been single or double digit copies of it in existence, and those are almost certainly all gone now.

It was thrown up on Soundcloud for a while by some finance guy who tried out with the band in 1998, then got deleted when people finally noticed it. A lot of people on here have it, and if you dig around a bit you can find it.

I'm kind of torn on it. While I don't think Mark sounds bad on the original, he does and always will have that amateur sound to him that knocks him down a few pegs (though that dude goes crazy on Esaul, that was amazing). Chester's vocal take is also completely different, and while I would have liked to hear a straighter re-enactment of Mark's original vocal, the things Chester does on that song are great. Mike, though, sounds like shit, lmao. Maybe not shit, but it's very clearly a worse vocal take to me. He's absolutely more energetic on the Xero version. I wonder if he had soured on the song by that point. Overall, I think Chester's vocals put the LP version over the top for me, though I'd love to hear a version where Mike's stuff is spliced in from the Xero version, though the vocal overlap probably makes that impossible.

I don't think Phoenix is in play for that since he's not on any of this material. Brad's the most likely option if it's post-HTEP, but it could potentially be Kyle Christner, if I'm understanding the timeline right.

I don't know about that - Meteora's had more reissues on vinyl (granted, only one in 2013 in the US), while ATS has never been reissued. I didn't know it had been released outside of the Super Deluxe box at all before checking just now. I think Meteora is just easier for them to put out for this, since it's been reissued more recently.

Literally all they were saying is that it would follow the pattern of the HT20 box set, dude.

The Linkinpedia dates reference the dates listed on whatever CD the demos come from, so it's possible (likely, even) that the demo was made in 1999, and was the "canonical" one that they put on all their internal demo CDs. I don't think we really have perspective on how many versions of a given song were recorded, so there could be earlier versions that just didn't make it onto any of the internal CDs we got our hands on. I suppose there's no way to say with any certainty in either direction. About Rhinestone, though, I'm pretty confident it's going to be a Mark version, given that it's labeled as a Xero demo, and the other three are all Mark demos. It would be a weird break from what that label implies if it's a Chester demo.

The thought process there is that there is almost certainly only one version of any professionally-recorded song with Mark, and a version of Rhinestone that matches this criteria was found on the Zomba New Music Sampler 1999 in January of this year. The track times are almost the same (3:44 on the sampler vs. 3:40 on HT20), so it should be the same version. I think the LPU12 version is the earliest known version with Chester, and it's the only Chester demo of the song we have besides the Studio Finals version.

My philosophy with things like doubles is that if it doesn't have much value to you (monetary or sentimental), then flip the original you had and keep what came in the box set. That way you keep the complete set but don't have to deal with, for instance, two Reanimation records, or two Hybrid Theory records (HT is dependent on the pressing though, given that some of them are pretty valuable). I've already thrown my copy of Reanimation on Discogs. Nothing else in the box is a double for me, though, so it's easier to unload what I've got than it may be for some other people on here.