Astat

Yes, Geki #2, we know. You've only said so about 57 times over the past 3 days.

They're making the music they wanted to avoid FOR THEIR PREVIOUS ALBUM.

Checking all the usual outlets I'm aware of and literally finding nothing...

Yeah, I'd say 40 minutes tops. You can actually push a 12" to almost 25 minutes a side, but you lose a ton of high-end frequencies on the songs closer to the end of each side because the grooves have to be cut so close together that the needle just doesn't have enough room to move back and forth as far as it needs to to reproduce all of the information in the waveform. 20 minutes per side is generally the upper limit of the "comfort zone" in that regard. /audio nerd talk However, if the majority of the songs on the record are 3 minute pop tunes like Heavy, that means there might be room for one long song..."Battle Symphony" sounds like it would be something really epic to me but that's just a guess on my part.

My thoughts, without reading any other recent responses... Pros: -Kiiara really impressed me. Between the preview clip that showed her singing without any post-production on her voice and how good she sounded on the live version today, I was really surprised with how good she sings, considering how auto-tuned her vocals typically are. -In terms of sound design/production, this song SOUNDS about as good as anything Linkin Park has ever done. The drums kicking in is a big highlight, as is the guitar coming in during the last chorus. -Chorus is very catchy. Cons: -No intro at all guys? On a song that's only 2:50 without one? Just seems lazy. -Chester doesn't sound good on this at all. He sounds like he's singing while he can't quite clear his throat on all of the softer parts, and the chorus isn't much better. Just seems like this style really isn't suited for his voice. -As I said on Twitter earlier, good sounds don't necessarily make a good song. It's ultimately an average (at best) pop song with above average production.

Song was already finished when Kiiara was brought in. Those guys had already finished their contributions to the song and had no need to be in the studio on a day when all they were doing was tracking guest vocals. Best live performance of Burn it Down ever, Heavy sounded good in this format as well (as good as a song of mediocre-at-best quality can sound). Chester's vocals were on point, and I really liked the new guitar stuff Brad added to Heavy and Burn it Down.

20 bucks for a CD that includes a digital LPU membership that normally costs 10 bucks by itself is a DAMN good deal.

The fuck gives you the idea that there "won't be much Chester singing?"

There are 49 squares, but only 48 LP Ambassador accounts. Hmm...

They're probably the same people who thought this place was a lot more enjoyable for the few months you were banned. (Full disclosure - I have no opinion of whether this sounds good or not as of yet)

Mark met the taper in person at a PR07 show nearly a decade ago and stayed in touch with him for quite a while. I can say with like 99% confidence anything of his that hasn't already come out never will.

Since I'm adding modes where appropriate here's a quick little guide: Lydian: Major scale with a sharp 4 Mixolydian: Major scale with a minor 7 Dorian: Minor scale with a major 6 Phrygian: Minor scale with a flat 2 Locrian: Minor scale with a flat 2 AND a flat 5 Harmonic minor (not really a "mode" technically): Minor scale with a major 7 Lydian and locrian don't really show up much in LP music, but the rest are fairly common. When I make note of these, I still note the key as being either major or minor, since modes are based on scales and a key signature is somewhat of a different thing. Sometimes it's kind of a judgement call on a song's key/mode because you'll have songs in a minor key that use both a minor and a major seventh at different points, stuff like that, so some of this stuff is kind of debatable but I'm doing the best I can. With that said, even my level of music theory nerdiness can't figure out WTF is going on with Robot Boy. The root is D, and the bassline/left hand of the piano part outlines a D minor scale, but all of the actual D chords are major, and there's also a G major chord which doesn't fit into D minor. The dominating tonality of it is like dorian with a major 3rd that appears exclusively on all of the "one" chords, but the progression also has a Bb in it, so the minor sixth is still a big part of it too! It's like it constantly switches back and forth between dorian and mixolydian...weird.

Why, because they're going to be promo shows in support of a single you've already decided you hate from an album you've already decided you hate without hearing so much as a single note of either one, and you'd much rather wait and find out when you can go to a show and listen to them play a handful of songs from whatever previous album you decide doesn't suck when you wake up the morning of the show?

I feel like a lot of these keys got messed up somewhere along the way, because I spent a lot of time on the original guide and there's no way in hell I would have made as glaring of an oversight as saying Papercut's in Eb minor when it's in C# minor. Not sure who all has editing privileges on this anymore. There are so many corrections I want to make on this now...I made my contributions to this long before I understood modes or that there actually is a reason you say something's in the key of Bb instead of A#, for example.

I mean, it's really no secret that Linkin Park could realistically continue to exist with only Mike, Chester, and Brad in the group. Mike's both the primary songwriter and producer, Chester's the lead vocalist, and Brad's a co-writer/co-producer of a lot of the stuff Mike works on, in addition to being able to do stuff with the guitar work that Mike can't. It's not that the other three guys don't contribute, but what they do contribute is a much smaller portion of the overall writing process. Their value comes from a combination of enabling the band to perform their material live, having more people to bounce ideas off of, and being dependable people who have been around the group forever. I think people make the mistake of seeing "valuable" and "expendable" as mutually exclusive things. It's not that Linkin Park couldn't survive if some combination of Rob, Dave, and Joe weren't part of the band anymore, but why on earth would they get rid of them if they didn't have a reason to? I don't really see it as any different from a group like Nine Inch Nails where you have a primary songwriter and everybody else is a hired musician who either helps get the songwriter's ideas recorded for albums or tours with the songwriter as a means of reproducing those sounds live. It's just in this case, everybody's actually an official member of the band, rather than just being relegated to an "additional musician" role on an album or a "touring member" role on tour. Mike very easily could have been to Linkin Park what Trent Reznor is to Nine Inch Nails, he just decided early on that he wasn't going to operate that way.

Yeah, definitely rehearsing for TV/radio/web promotional appearances where they'll be performing the single and maybe a couple other songs. I'm sure the crew is at least getting a head start on all of the production elements for the full tour, but I doubt the band is rehearsing for actual tour dates already at this point.

I can confidently say that any perceived connection between that Instagram post and the piano teaser is pure fiction, whether via wishful thinking or outright bullshitting. There is NOTHING on that pad of paper that you could possibly extrapolate into piano notation. THIS is what shorthand piano tabulature looks like. The bottom line indicates beat subdivisions, the numbers on the left-hand side indicate which octave to play the notes on the corresponding line in. The notepad in Mike's Instagram post is just a bunch of random numbers without any real pattern to them, while the piano progression in the teaser clip is one progression of six chords that repeats over and over without any variation. I literally can't think of a way to make even the slightest connection between the two.

Quite possibly the most embarrassingly juvenile lyric ever written by a woman in her 30s and a nails-on-a-chalkboard vocal delivery on top of that, but okay. Oh, and the "Look Mom, I just learned the E minor pentatonic scale!" guitar riff is cheesy as hell too. At least it's got a decent beat?

Blood in the Cut by K.Flay. She's 31 years old and writes/sounds like she's 13. I actually thought Closer was a good tune, btw. I love Halsey, indifferent to the Chainsmokers though.

It's funny how I've seen the same haters saying they're done with LP every time they've released anything since QWERTY over a decade ago...yet the same people are still around. With that said, Gold is literally the second-most annoying song I can think of that I've heard on the radio in the last few years. I could probably walk around Los Angeles for 5 minutes on a weekend evening and bump into a female "alt pop" singer I'd rather hear on an LP collaboration than Kiiara. I'm starting to get a sense that this album is going to kind of come from the same place as the idea of collaborating with all those Warped Tour bands a couple years back - working with younger artists who cite LP as influences, except this time they're exploring the poppier side of their influence instead of rock bands. It's a great idea in theory, very well-intentioned and whatnot...the only problem is, as far as I've been able to tell, the majority of artists coming up these days who cite LP as an influence either sound incredibly derivative or just make plain terrible music. Also, it's increasingly seeming like nearly every song on this record is going to be a collaboration of some sort, which begs the question of how they're going to play any of this stuff live, even more so than with the collaborations on The Hunting Party.

Yeah, if they're just hearing the final album in sequence for the first time now, we're still several weeks away from hearing anything. Album may or may not be mastered yet, single may not have been chosen yet, artwork/album title/final track titles may not be decided on, promotion plans probably aren't finished yet...

Numb/Encore had new guitar and bass parts (guitar by Brad, bass by Mike). The guitar in DOYS/LFY was re-recorded for the first part of the song up until the first LFY chorus (I'd assume same is true of the bass). Nothing instrumentally re-recorded for Izzo, song was just pitched up/sped up. Big Pimpin is the original beat unchanged, POA/OSC uses the Hybrid Theory instrumental parts exclusively. I think there was more sampled percussion stuff added to the Jigga What beat but the bass/guitar was unchanged. I don't believe Rob, Joe, or Phoenix re-recorded anything. Joe and Rob didn't need to and what little bass work was done was handled by Mike.

IGD was a Fort Minor song before Fort Minor was a thing. It's a song that Mike wrote and did all of the instruments/production for, except the scratching. But since Mike wasn't doing a solo project yet, he made it with the X-Ecutioners collab in mind and it ended up on their album. I'm sure the song was always intended to be on Built From Scratch, but that doesn't really make it any less of a Mike song.

Why would a well-known organization/event like the YVA's that's been around for a decade and has a substantial media presence put fake information on their website? This would be like the U.S. equivalent of the iHeartRadio awards posting fake information on their site. Note that it doesn't say anywhere on there that "Linkin Park" is performing. It lists the four individual guys separately. No Joe/Phoenix, and Brad is listed as the bass player. Hmm... *Edit* If you scroll left/right on the page that lists the "performers," it just repeats the same 4 guys' names over and over, sometimes listing the same guy multiple times even. The text when you hover over any of them is also just a brief generic bio on Mike. It almost seems like it was placeholder text leftover from when they built the website?

ITT: Geki (predictably) hating on a new Linkin Park album he hasn't heard a single note from, because of a song on a One OK Rock album. You just can't make this shit up.