Astat

This could actually be the rehearsal studio from the Lockout videos...although I think Swinghouse has moved at least once in the years since then so the current location probably isn't where the band actually rehearsed.

On the Snax page: 1999.06.25 Williard, OH Williard Church Of God "Williard" should just be "Willard." No I.

I hear literally no similarity whatsoever between the two lol.

I won't assign "numbered" reviews to this one like I usually do, but here are some quick thoughts on each song... Aubrey One - Guitars similar to Basquiat in the middle section, probably not intentional. Great eerie vibe, kind of a cross between Meteora and ATS in terms of sound. Intro drags on for longer than it should though. Can't imagine vocals on this one. Malathion + Tritonus - "Malathion" is probably the actual title of the song, Tritonus references the studio in Berlin where it was recorded (they probably did another recording of the song in the U.S. at some point, so the title is probably to help differentiate between them). EPIC intro on this song, totally Metallica-esque once everything kicks in. Sounds more like a leftover from The Hunting Party than a 2008 demo. The riff at the end is NOT the 2008 Points of Authority outro as some have claimed. Definitely a similar turnaround at the end of the song, but still not the same riff. Also, can't tell if the drums on this one are programmed or not...the snare at the end sounds very suspect (maybe live drums with triggers on them?). If they're live drums, sounds like Rob used a double kick on this song, which would have been completely foreign to him in 2008. Maybe the drumkit at Tritonus happened to have a double pedal on it and he decided to use it on a whim? Wish there was more of a guitar solo on this one, there's a point in the middle where it sounds like Brad is about to launch into one, but he just ends up playing some long sustained notes over the top of the chords. Berlin One, Version C - Probably another demo that was started at the Tritonus studio (hence the "Berlin" name), but worked on more later (hence the 2009 date and "Version C"). I'm ALMOST positive the piano in this was the precursor to Burning in the Skies. Same exact key and chord progression as the verses of that song. Hopefully we get notes from a band member on the tracks on this CD, because I'd be willing to bet they'd confirm this. Definitely a track that was still a "seed" at this point. Blanka - You can tell this song was stitched together from a bunch of guitar riffs that were recorded at different points, there's no consistent tone on the guitar tracks here. Sounds like something that could have been worked into a full song, but the guitar riffs are so chromatic-based and jarring that I have a hard time imagining any kind of melody working over most of this track. Would've had to be either an all-screaming song or a song with Mike rapping throughout most of it and Chester doing the chorus. I imagine the band felt kind of limited in what they could do vocally with this track, which is probably why they scrapped it. Heartburn - Very interesting instrumental backdrop on this one! Sounds almost like something that could have been used on the Mall soundtrack. Guitar also reminds me a little of the guitar at the very end of Robot Boy. This demo reminds me a lot of "Yo," in that it sounds like they had one interesting idea but it never got anything else added to it. Breaking the Habit - Timeline-wise, this demo definitely comes before "Drawing" from LPU9. The guitar on the LPU9 version was re-recorded and a bunch of the instrumental stuff sounds a lot cleaner. The "Drawing" title should also technically apply to this demo, but we know how LP has been with working titles on LPU releases the last few years. Pretty gutsy of Mike to share this with us, as it's a VERY rough-sounding vocal attempt. This is like the very definition of "scratch track," Mike was clearly just getting the melody down knowing Chester would do a way better job with it later (Mike's told the story of this song many times, but the lyrical idea was one he had been working on for years, which explains the presence of full lyrics on an otherwise VERY early-stage demo). It also pisses me off that people are taking the "Pissing in the room" line out of context as something funny...it's a song about a person struggling with alcoholism, guys (we know Chester's substance abuse problems were largely what Mike wrote this song about). The person Mike's singing about has probably literally pissed on the floor numerous times because they're such a drunk wreck all the time. The broken glass on the floor in the next line is probably broken beer bottles. Read between the lines, for fuck's sake. /rant Dave's Beat feat. Joe - Corrected the stupid typo in the title of this one. If it's like that on the actual CD case, I swear to God...but anyway, funny little LPU 8-style track with some hilarious use of Auto Tune. I'd assume Joe is doing the vocal on this. I actually wish this was longer, lol. Froctagon - Holy awful sound quality, Batman! There's some straight-up Death Magnetic-level clipping on the guitars on this one. Gotta laugh at the bass-and-snare-only drums on this track, sounds like Mike did this one all himself, and we know he can't play drums for shit. He probably sampled the bass and snare on the kit at his home studio and copy-pasted a bunch to make the beat. The guitar "solo" on this is almost the same as the one on Malathion, haha! LP clearly wrote some really heavy demos early in the ATS process...and I can honestly say that all of them sound "forced" to some degree. I would have made the same decision in going with the direction of ATS if I knew this was what the early demos were sounding like. Night and day difference between "this heavy" and "THP heavy" a few years later. Rhinocerous - There's no "u" in "rhinoceros," guys. But anyway...the trend of Meteora demos being instantly identifiable as Meteora demos continues here. Pretty cool synth and guitar stuff on this track though. I love the scratching noises that interrupt the guitar riff at various points too. The lead guitar line in the chorus sounds like something that would have been replaced with a vocal melody later. Would have liked to hear some vocals on this one...they clearly avoided almost all vocal writing until the last stage of recording this album. There are probably VERY few demos with vocals that exist from this period, sadly. After Canada - Anything dated 2004 or 2005 is automatically interesting to me, because our knowledge of the band's writing/recording from that period is incredibly limited. Sounds like a demo that involved at least Mike and Brad (some of the guitar work on this doesn't sound like stuff Mike would do circa 2005)...maybe this is something the two of them did around the time Brad remixed Where'd You Go? Either that, or it's a VERY early Minutes to Midnight demo, maybe from late in the year. Parts of this song remind me a LOT of some of the background music from the LP Recharge game. Pleasant little song to listen to, but easily forgettable too in my opinion. Overall, this is far from my favorite LPU CD, probably my least favorite in the post-LPU 9 era, actually. I wouldn't say there's anything BAD on it...but nothing really stands out, either. It's literally 31 minutes of total mediocrity, only broken up by the surprise of actually hearing a vocal on Breaking the Habit, and the comic relief of Dave's Beat. The last five LPU CDs, regardless of their overall quality, always had at LEAST one true standout track on them (Across the Line, Pale, Slip, So Far Away, Holding Company...to name one from each album anyway, some have more). I can't really pick anything from this CD...MAYBE Malathion, but even that track doesn't hold a candle to any of the 5 I just mentioned from past CDs. I can't say I'm "disappointed," because more demos are always cool with me, but I could easily forget most of these songs exist. Nevertheless, it's another new release in one of the best years for new/previously unreleased LP music we've ever had, and I'll at least have fun learning all the new guitar parts.

I agree that having select live tracks on LPU CDs again, particularly with DSPs going away, wouldn't necessarily be a bad idea. The trouble is that there are SPECIFIC live tracks that would be best-suited for this idea, but I doubt LP would stick strictly to those tracks. I'm talking about things like a DSP quality recording of Castle of Glass (the original version), the only full live performance of ALTNC from the Harman show earlier this year, good mixes of some of the guest performances at the Concert for the Philippines/Warped Tour show, maybe something silly like a slightly more refined version of the "reggae" Burn it Down they do at rehearsals/soundchecks...or they could dig in the vaults and throw us a bone with a SBD of Nobody's Listening/Hit the Floor, that'd be nice. Basically limit it to "one offs"/songs we don't have good recordings of. But this is LP we're talking about...give them the option to include live tracks and they're bound to give us another LPU 3 or 7 at some point. I'll take CDs of nothing but instrumentals for the next 10 years straight before I'll put up with something like that again.

OSC CD single was released January 15th, 2001 (hence the timing of the band's first trip to the UK - I'd assume this was also when it was sent to radio internationally). 9/28/2000 was probably the release date of the music video, it was already on the radio in the U.S. by that point.

The Meteora booklet mentions "Brad and Mike's guitar parts" on that song, which I'd assume means he probably did some of the guitars on the demo or something. It's in a tuning none of Mike's live guitars are in though (so is Somewhere I Belong, actually, but they managed to transpose that one to a different tuning convincingly enough).

2008? Even with the LPL 3.0 > WHOOPS BACK TO 2.0 clusterfuck that I sort of caused ?

Looks like they've fixed whatever error wasn't letting me on the page with the LPU XIV CD...now on to the next most troublesome error: Is LPUTV not working for anybody else? All I'm getting is an "HTML5 player not found" message when I try to play any video on the site...

Now it's giving me the "membership required" message as soon as I try to log in...I HAVE A FUCKING MEMBERSHIP. You know what? I bet I know what happened. My login info for the LP.com community was exactly the same as my login info for LPU. They probably fucked up merging it all together just like every other goddamn time they've tried switching to a "new system" with LP.com/LPU in the past. I'm sure a lot of people's accounts are the same way. Don't have your website go live just to meet a deadline if the product you put out is so horrendously non-functional that even calling it a "beta version" would be insulting to anything else that's ever gone through a beta period..."beta" implies that they actually tested this shit before dumping it on their customers. That apparently didn't happen...

Seems to be live completely now...and it looks like they fucked it up and people with LPU 13 memberships can't actually access any of the LPU 14 pages. Logged in, trying to access the LPU XIV CD in the store, and it's giving me an "access denied - this page requires a membership" message. Doing the same on numerous other sub-pages in the LPU section as well. Awesome. *facepalm*

Not quite. The splash page at lpunderground.com is up (with some errors - the package pictures are of last year's items...), but the login button just redirects to linkinpark.com. The new LPU is all contained within the LP.com site, but it doesn't look like the actual content is up yet. Lots of 404 errors still.

No.

Silly thing to think, RME was released on LPU 6 and Mark has songwriting credits on 3 of the songs on Hybrid Theory (as well as their subsequent remixes on Reanimation), plus several other demos we've gotten through LPU over the past couple years. Complete non-issue. RME was dropped from Milton Keynes to open up more time for the Jay-Z portion of the set, plain and simple (Jigga What/Faint is longer than Faint, they played part of Numb/Encore when they already played Numb in full, and the encore break was longer than usual).

Not to mention the PlugAir that seemingly 5% of people managed to actually get to work?

^Sounds excessively complicated. I still think the best solution is the one I texted Mark earlier: We need to send Dmitry into space and have him hack into Samsung's satellite. We can totally make this happen in 3 days, right? Maybe a Kickstarter?

Breaking the Habit was a TWO minute instrumental that was extended later, per Mike. The 10 minute thing is completely fake.

Bleh...Tuesday show. Des Moines is on a weekend and about an hour closer (I was WAY off in estimating how close I am to Des Moines vs. Milwaukee earlier). Unless I plan my entire summer vacation around this show, I don't see how I'm going to manage this. If I can only do one 2015 show, it'll have to be Des Moines...and I'm still not even sure if I can make that work.

I'm thinking the more likely story is that LP had a 5-year "lease" with Paramount to use the likenesses of the Transformers characters from the second movie, and they didn't renew it.

Yeah, the version on LP's channel definitely used to have the Transformers scenes in it. I remember the "non-Transformers version" coming out a while after the original. Also, the New Divide video originally premiered on LP's Myspace page before it was up anywhere else. If you look through their videos on Myspace, you'll notice that the Making Of for New Divide's video was posted way before the version of the actual music video that's currently on there: https://myspace.com/linkinpark/videos There are also 2 uploads for New Divide itself, both of which are the "non-Transformers version." So they obviously took the original video down and re-uploaded the other version at some point. Not sure how they managed to do it on Youtube and keep the original upload stats, I don't think Youtube's editor lets you swap in an entirely different video! Something's definitely going on here. It's like the original version that included the Transformers footage doesn't even exist anymore in terms of LP's official media outlets. *Edit* The original video was uploaded in May 2009, while the "non-Transformers version" first appeared on iTunes in July: http://www.lpassociation.com/forums/showthread.php?t=29797

Talk about a random location for a festival show, lol.

The listing on the setlist was more of a handwritten note, and I believe it said "NoBrain Thing," not "NoBrain Remix." I don't think we ever figured out exactly what it meant specifically, but given that NoBrain's work on the song appeared during the outro, the consensus was that it was probably a reminder of some sample Mike needed to trigger or something like that.

I do remember "Give it All" now, I believe that was the first song I heard by them. Saw a local band cover it at a bar show once and the singer failed miserably on the chorus.

Slightly, yes.

I'll try and make it down to the Des Moines show, it's on a Friday so I SHOULD have the day off...in-laws live in southern Minnesota so we could probably head down there the night before and make the rest of the drive on Friday rather than doing it all in one go. Also, Cleveland gets shit on for the THIRD album cycle in a row. I feel really bad for all my friends/family that still live in the area, the home of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame apparently isn't even worthy of a stop on a B-market tour 7 years after their last show in the area (and ELEVEN years after their last show that was actually in the city). On another note, I can think of few bands more generic and overrated than Rise Against. There are far worse opening acts out there, but I've probably heard about 15 different Rise Against songs over the years...and the only one I can recall by name is Swing Life Away, because it's the only one that sounds REMOTELY different from the rest!