Astat

The relationship between Oh No and the final version of Points of Authority is clearly obvious...listen to the beat that comes in at 0:50 in Oh No, then listen to the drum beat in the chorus/bridge of Points of Authority (0:50-1:15, 1:36-2:56). They're identical. The metallic "ping" noise on the snare hits totally stands out in both tracks. Not to mention that they're at identical tempos and the 3-note riff based around Eb, E, and Db is present in both versions (the one in Oh No is just an earlier version of the riff, which makes sense, as Mike confirmed years ago that the guitar riff in Points of Authority is a chopped-up and re-arranged sampling of an original riff Brad played). And as I already said, instrumental or not, a demo is a demo, and most of the band's demo recordings, particularly prior to 2007, probably exist solely in instrumental form, as vocals were always the last thing they put on a track. If a song isn't a finished idea, it's probably not going to have vocals. They said we'd get 10 unreleased demos, we got 9 (with the 10th being debatable, as it IS different from the previously released version of the WID remix). It was confirmed practically from the beginning when Pretend to Be was released on A Decade Underground that it would also be one of the LPUX tracks. A Decade Underground is supposed to be a sampler of LPU tracks from throughout the history of LPU, so how else would it have made sense to release it on that compilation?

It wouldn't be any worse than Snoop Dogg's crowd on PR04, trust me.

Like I've already said, it's not EXACTLY the same as the Distorted Remix...probably about 95-98% identical though. Anyway, I typed up a review, so here goes: Unfortunate - Pretty standard-issue intro track, sounds fairly reminiscent of some of the concert intros Joe used in the 2000-early 2004 period. The strings sound like they're from the same sample bank Mike used when he did Drawing. Nothing wrong with this song, it's a nice little track, but we've heard this type of stuff out of LP plenty of times before. What We Don't Know - Sounds like this is another fully-finished Minutes to Midnight b-side! That makes what, 4 that we've gotten (No Roads Left, Across the Line, Blackbirds, What We Don't Know)? In that case, there should still be one other one lying around somewhere, unless the original versions of Not Alone or Pretened to Be were among the final 17 tracks they recorded. Anyway, I like this song a lot better than Pretend to Be. There's some pretty cool instrumentation going on, and it has a great melody. The lyrics aren't the greatest, but still a nice performance from Chester. Oh No - This is kind of in the same vein as Stick and Move/Runaway, there's barely any resemblance to the final track, but it's still cool to hear where it came from. The heavy beat that comes in about a third of the way through the track is clearly what they retained and built the rest of the song around. I Have Not Begun - I love how this song comes across like one big, rambling verse from Mike. I know there's a repeating "chorus" part but his delivery still never lets up. It's like he just picked up the mic and spilled everything that was on his mind. It's a bit faster than Mike's normal delivery too, it's been quite a while since I heard him rap like this. The echoing vocals at the beginning/end of the song remind me a LOT of the effect he used on the intro of Do What We Did. And like I've already mentioned, this continues a trend of Mike debuting unreleased verses in a live setting and then putting the full songs they're from on LPU CDs (Dedicated, Standing in the Middle). Pale - I know a lot of people are in love with this song, and I can see why, it goes into some pretty epic territory. But I think it's a bit too slow of a buildup, it gets a little monotonous in spots. And then when the heavy guitars finally do come in, I feel like it still could've been taken up another notch. This is one of those tracks that I really wish they would've kept working on, because it definitely shows a ton of potential. Pretend to Be - I've reviewed this song before, and my opinion hasn't really changed. I don't think it's anything special for the most part, some fairly interesting instrumentation (Rob in particular shines on this track), but easily forgettable from a lyrical standpoint, and unlike What We Don't Know, Chester's vocal performance isn't very redeeming either - the melody is pretty dull, which is actually a rarity for a Linkin Park song. Still nice to have another fully-finished song on the CD though. Divided - This track reminds me a bit of A.15 from Mike's VMA score tracks, or at least the intro does. In fact, the whole track is very reminiscent of the style of those VMA tracks. It sounds like this could easily be an all-Mike track, so it wouldn't surprise me if this was something he was working on around the same time he did the VMA tracks and some of the Fort Minor stuff. What I've Done (M. Shinoda Remix) - As I already pointed out, this isn't TOTALLY identical to the Distorted Remix we already had, although it is very similar. Regardless, it's still easily the biggest throwaway/filler track on the CD, and it really makes me wonder if this was a last-minute substitution for another track that they couldn't get clearance for or something. But having this track on the CD did make me realize that this is a much better remix than I remembered it being. I hadn't listened to it in probably a year or so, so at least this CD got me to listen to it again and give it a second chance. Coal - Haha, this track is so weird, I love it! It sounds like a mashup of a bunch of sound effects from 90s horror films or something like that. I have a feeling a lot of people will be let down by this track, as it's really monochromatic, but it's probably one of the most unique tracks we've ever gotten from them, and hey, let's face it - this is the only song that's surfaced from this far back other than the 4 tracks on the Xero tape. This song is 13 years old! The novelty of it alone makes it worth having. Halo - Hmm, I can't decide if I like this song or Pale better. Pale has more meat on it, but I can't help but love the distorted guitar harmonics that make up the "melody" on this one. This is a lot more interesting than some of the other stuff they were coming up with around this time, I wonder why this song didn't get finished for Meteora? Oh, wait...it doesn't follow the verse/chorus/verse/chorus/bridge/chorus structure. Warner and Don Gilmore never would've allowed outside-the-box thinking like this to appear on THEIR album!

I know he uses 2 of them for the first part of The Catalyst. Other than that, not sure.

http://lplive.net/shows/20101107.php - Jornada Del Muerto wasn't played at this show.

An update on something I posted previously: The rack of 5 "timbale-like" drums that Rob has added onto his kit are actually just additional trigger pads for samples, they're just built into acoustic drum shells to make them look like real drums. He has a total of 9 trigger pads on his set now: The 2 regular Pintech ones that he's always had next to his hi-hat, a third one above his ride cymbal on his right (previously a third Pintech pad, but it's now in a drum shell), the big rack of 5 of them to the left of his hi-hat, and one more regular Pintech pad that sits parallel to the ground below those. Also, I can confirm 100% that Rob is NOT using a double bass pedal. There are plenty of overhead shots of him on the EMAs footage that show he only has one "dot" on his bass drum for a single beater. As for Mike, the second microphone he uses for vocoder effects is a Shure (I think the rest of the band's vocal mics are Sennheise'sr now), it looks like an SM57 but it could really be anything from their "7" line. He also has some kind of effects processor on the ground next to his sustain pedal for his keyboard, I'm assuming he uses that to control the handful of vocal effects he uses. And as for the theremin, it's definitely a Moog Etherwave, and I know he at least uses it on New Divide and When They Come For Me for various distorted/filtered synth effects.

Yup! The Wake Up Show appearance was sometime in late 2001/early 2002 I want to say, and Standing in the Middle was mashed up with Nobody's Listening at the handful of UK shows they played in November 2003.

Probably not the first show of the tour, but with the way they typically route their U.S. arena tours, St. Paul is usually one of the dates near the beginning of the tour.

I Have Not Begun = the next Dedicated/Standing in the Middle. Mike has a history of debuting previously unheard verses in live settings and then putting the full versions of the songs on LPU CDs at a later date.

Eh, I'm a big enough asshole, maybe that means I HAVE a big enough asshole... I've got a lot of bills to pay though. I'm only bringing in between $400-$475 a paycheck and my rent alone is $550 a month. My girlfriend works too and that helps a lot, but money's still really tight. The company I work for is going to be closed for 10 days around Christmas too, that's not going to help.

Considering it was confirmed ages ago that it would be, probably not.

This obviously excites me. I don't care what lengths I have to go to or what kind of degrading things I have to do for cash, I'll find a way to be there.

Also, something else I want to clarify: "What I've Done (M. Shinoda Remix)" is NOT the same as the Distorted Remix! They're very similar versions of the same remix, but they aren't identical. The version we already had was 3:48 in length, this one is 3:40. There's one repeat of the bridge riff that's been cut out of this version, and a bunch of other subtle differences in the overall mix. Still the biggest "throwaway" track on the CD for sure, but the bottom line is that it's not identical.

This is a CD of demos. Most, if not all, of LP's demos dating from pre-2007 (a.k.a. over half of the tracks on this CD) started as instrumentals. Most of LP's demos never reach the "fully-finished song" stage. Vocals are nearly always the last part to be put on a finished song. Anyone bitching about the number of instrumentals on this CD (a.k.a. a large percentage of the posts in this thread) clearly hasn't paid any attention to the numerous times the band has explained their songwriting process over the years. How many totally finished tracks do you guys really think the band has lying around that they haven't already used for something? We're talking about a band that wrote over 150 song ideas for one album and ended up only recording final versions of about 17 of them. There's probably a good reason we only get stuff like Across the Line and Pretend to Be every once in a while.

Keep in mind, LP's on-stage setlist doesn't list Empty Spaces or The Radiance, so they only have 23 songs listed normally. If they dropped OSC, Crawling, Given Up, and NMS, their on-stage setlist would then have 19 songs on it. Instead of relying on opinions, I think it'd be more effective to point out that Matt Bellamy pretty much hits every note he sings perfectly every single night on stage. Muse makes far fewer mistakes on stage than LP does (even on their best nights), and their stage setup/light show is far more elaborate. I think judging the quality of a live band should be based on 1) how well they perform their material, and 2) how much the theatrical aspects of their performances set them apart from other bands. Muse easily trumps LP in both categories. Oh yeah, sorry, I forgot, we have to blindly believe that OMGZ LP IS DA BEST BAND AT EVERYTHING EVER! Sorry that some people refuse to turn a blind eye to the fact that there are bands out there that do certain things better than LP. This "any band that beats LP for an award sucks ass!" attitude displayed by you and so many other people makes me laugh my ass off every time. I guarantee you'd be talking shit about Kings of Leon or Ozzy if they had won too.

The Requiem is played exactly the same live as it is on the album. It's a straight playback of the original recording. The intro to Wretches and Kings is, more precisely, a mashup of the Mario Savio speech with the instrumental portion of The Radiance. The Radiance is essentially split into 2 sections during the show - the instrumental portion is used after The Requiem/during the intro to Wretches and Kings, while the speech by Oppenheimer is used later during the interlude between Numb and Breaking the Habit. The extended outro to Faint has been shortened a bit for 2010, and the extended outro to One Step Closer has been slightly modified as well (the big pause before the outro riff kicks in has been removed). There's a very subtle, but noticeable, keyboard transition between The Catalyst and The Messenger in the live shows. The Catalyst ends on a D root note on the keyboards, and Mike modulates it up half a step to an Eb to fade into the beginning of The Messenger. The Messenger is moved from the key of G to the key of Eb live, and the outro is extended, which also features some drumming by Rob that isn't present on the studio version. The extended outro to Given Up has one additional drum fill/guitar chord added to the end of it, Given Up normally ends on an E, then they add an F chord after that, since New Divide starts on an F.

I don't have too many "problems," save for a select few people who feel the need to call me out when I've done nothing to provoke them.

A microphone used for a specific effect failing to work isn't something that I would call part of "playing live" or the "live experience." I doubt any seasoned touring musician would think so, either. If the band screws up, that's one thing, but technical difficulties are a different beast entirely. The entire point of the DSPs is that they're supposed to be comparable in quality to any official live album. If I was recording a live album and something screwed up like that, I'd sure as hell want it fixed. I'd just rather cut the entire song out of the recording than have it in there without that vocoder effect, that's the main point of interest of that interlude in the first place. Not fixing it would be just as bad as being like "oh, Brad's guitar didn't work for the entire duration of One Step Closer. Oh well, leave it the way it is!" People don't pay 10 bucks for shit like that to be allowed to let slide. These are supposed to be professional recordings, and leaving stuff like that alone just comes off as lazy.

Long story short: The full multitracks for the 6 DLC tracks aren't out there yet, or haven't been shared if they are. The ones for Bleed it Out are though, and the "acapella" tracks of the 6 DLC songs (a.k.a. with the drum/bass/guitar tracks taken out) are going around as well.

I don't see how an album that's been out less than two months and already gone Gold in 7 countries and Platinum in 2 more, while producing 2 singles that made it to the top 10 on the Billboard Rock Songs chart (the first single going to #1 on that chart and also cracking the ever-elusive Top 40 on the Hot 100), can be "doing shitty." Songs with well-defined choruses: Burning in the Skies When They Come For Me Wretches and Kings Iridescent The Catalyst The Messenger Songs where Mike sings more than Chester: ...The Requiem and Fallout? That's seriously all I can think of. There are plenty of songs where Mike and Chester sing together or trade parts back and forth, but none where you can really say Mike sings more than Chester does.

I really think if they're going to keep swapping between the Papercut/Messenger set and the LFY/LOATR set, they need to change the order around a bit for the latter. LOATR right in the middle of the encore makes no sense IMO, totally out of place. I was okay with it at first, thinking it was just a temporary thing to please some people who were complaining, but that song is definitely not an encore-caliber track.

True, but those kind of songs still seem to manage to come around every once in a while. Hey There Delilah by Plain White T's and I'm Yours by Jason Mraz are a couple more recent ones I can think of. Granted, those aren't by "big rock bands," but they're still relatively similar styles of songs.

This really isn't news, lol. SDC was performing 6th Street Bridge live before PR08 even started. It was established probably over 2 years ago in the LP community that it was an actual song of theirs. Also, I'm pretty sure there were more than 2 intros they used during the tour, and they weren't setlist-specific. I seem to recall they started off the tour just using one intro, they didn't debut another one until about 5 shows in.

I see no reason to believe that any song is "100%" out as a single. Whether or not it's currently being played live doesn't make a difference (Breaking the Habit, Crawling, and Numb were all songs that debuted live long after their respective albums came out). Song structure clearly doesn't make a difference either, they released a 5:42 song as their leadoff single from the album for crying out loud. When They Come For Me has a chorus. It just doesn't have any lyrics in the chorus. And that hasn't stopped songs like Self Esteem by The Offspring from becoming radio hits. So what if Blackout isn't mainstream at all? Neither was The Catalyst. There are so many potential hit singles on this album, I have no idea where they'll go from here. I think Iridescent is a lock to be a single at some point. When They Come For Me has a ton of potential. Burning in the Skies probably has the broadest appeal of any song on the album (except maybe Waiting For the End, but that's already a single). The Messenger could easily blow up as the next "feel-good acoustic ballad from a big rock band" song a la Good Riddance/Swing Life Away. Robot Boy could cross over into Top 40 territory if they wanted to release that as a single. I seriously think the only 2 non-obvious choices for singles on the album are Wretches and Kings and Blackout. Blackout is probably the hardest track on the album to warm up to if you didn't like it right off the bat, and Wretches and Kings just seems like a second-rate When They Come For Me in a lot of ways, although it still has some commercial appeal and might do well as a single anyway.

I highly doubt they'll ever play the song in its original key live. It's kind of in the same category as No Roads Left is with Mike, it would probably totally wreck Chester's voice to attempt the original version live. It's not like they just took it down a half step to ease the strain on his voice a bit, they dropped the song all the way down from the key of G to the key of Eb. In its original key, The Messenger has the highest note Chester's ever hit on record - a high C (a half step higher than the peaks in Given Up's choruses and the long "goooooot" near the end of Waiting For the End). Unless they do a one-off performance of the song on a TV show that isn't in the middle of a tour or something like that, it's probably not a good idea for Chester to even attempt that song. Anyway, I like the live version a bit more than I did originally, but I think it could be tweaked around a bit. The studio version is a bit on the rushed side, but I think the live version is too slow. It would probably liven up a bit too if they took it up to the key of E, I've been messing around with a version of it in E and I think it sounds pretty good.