Astat

You can buy some of the previous LPU CDs in the online store, yeah. Most of the older ones are sold out though...the ones that are still available are 5, 7, 8, and 10. All of the others are available as digital downloads though.

There might have been a couple more, but I doubt there were many. BOW was really only active for a short period toward the end of 2005, with the exception of the Club Tattoo parties.

Nobody remembers where this info originated from anymore? That's surprising...it was one of many factoids in the "Touring Info" section on pushmeaway.com: http://web.archive.org/web/20050207052204/...ouringinfo.html "D12 and Eminem showed up at the the Projekt Revolution 2002 tour date in Detroit. They rapped a little and later came out to help with "One Step Closer"." That website was usually VERY reliable for info - the girl who ran it knew LP personally, and the site itself was hosted on the Sparkart servers that used to host linkinpark.com as well (she won a contest that got her site hosted on LP's servers way back in like 2001).

In the End, sometime in the fall of 2001. Bought the CD the following March.

First 5 tracks off the album, plus Tinfoil as an opener and Until it Breaks over the WFTE intro is my bet. They tend to debut the more straightforward songs earlier in the cycle and then get into the more ambitious stuff later on.

Aww shit son, you know what time it is? Astat's book-sized review time! LOST IN THE ECHO Pretty solid opening track, I feel like it could use a bit more of a drawn-out buildup in the intro, but it doesn't sound bad the way it is either. I think this track has my least favorite of Mike's rap parts on the album, with the possible exception of the bridge on BURN IT DOWN. I really like the backing vocals at the end of each verse, and the chorus is really cool too. My biggest gripe with this track is how random the vocal scratching part after the second chorus is. It comes out of nowhere and doesn't really add much to the track in my opinion. Great overall vibe on this track, just some nitpicky things about it that bug me. 7/10 IN MY REMAINS This is one of my favorites on the album. The really poppy verse vocals threw me off at first, but they provide an excellent contrast with the chorus, which is another really good one. The part where Mike comes in over the military-style snare drum roll makes my hair stand on end, and I love the "one by one" gang vocals that accompany the last chorus. I can definitely see this being a single at some point, and it'll probably be a great live song too. 9/10 BURN IT DOWN I still think this is a solid song. I like to think of it as "New Divide light," similar style of track, but more concise and with a rap verse added in place of the electronic bridge. Chester really puts in a good performance on this track, and there's a lot of "ear candy" to be found in the instrumental as well. I'm not a big fan of Mike's rap on this track, it's always sounded like they put it in there just for the sake of having a rap part on the first single, regardless of whether or not the song really needed one. 7/10 LIES GREED MISERY I still stand by my initial opinion of this song, it sounds like Mike had a couple decent verses and a somewhat interesting musical idea that amounted to maybe a minute and a half's worth of a song, so they brought in Chester to take a big, angsty shit all over it just for the sake of not having two "full" songs on the album that clocked in at under 2 minutes. I see this song as a cross between Wretches and Kings and Bleed it Out, it has a lot of musical similarities to the former, but tries to pull off the "death party vibe" of the latter, but it doesn't do either one particularly well. This song's biggest redeeming quality is that it surprisingly translated well to live performances. 4/10 I'LL BE GONE Okay, there HAS to be an intentional connection to When They Come For Me on this song. I wondered that when I first saw the song title, but kind of shrugged it off as a coincidence. But seriously, try singing any of the singing parts from WTCFM (either the "ahh-ahh" chorus or the "oh, when they come for me" part in the bridge) over the chorus to this song - they fit PERFECTLY. If that's a coincidence, it's a mind-blowing one. Anyway, I like this song quite a bit. I was kind of disappointed in how subtle Owen Pallett's string contributions wound up being, I was anticipating more epic-sounding, Breaking the Habit-esque stuff. I feel like the last chorus could've gone on a bit longer and kicked the song up one more notch, the way the song ends just seems a little sudden. Overall a cool-sounding song, but it doesn't have anything about it that really jumps out at me enough to call it a GREAT song. 7.5/10 CASTLE OF GLASS I was kind of surprised by this one, I should really learn to stop paying attention to pre-album reviews of songs, because in the case of this song, they weren't even CLOSE. "Americana?" "Campfire song?" Seriously? It amazes me how some people can be this far off and hold down a job in the music journalism industry. A line like "take me down to the riverbend" doesn't make a song folk, and the presence of an acoustic guitar doesn't make a song a campfire song, kthx. Anyway, pretty cool song that starts off with an eerie electronic vibe, but winds up in alternative/pop punk territory by the time it's over. I really like the unison vocals by Mike and Chester in this song, they really blend well on this one. It amazes me how far LP's come with their vocal arrangements as their career has progressed, and this song is a great example of that. 8/10 VICTIMIZED This song is a minute and fifty seconds of total WTF-ness...in a relatively good way. The drums on this track kick all kinds of ass, I really look forward to watching Rob play this track live. Really curious what that garbled voice at the beginning is saying too, it sounds like someone talking through a megaphone about how they want Linkin Park to go back to their roots? If that's the case, I think it's a brilliant musical bitch-slap to all the people who want to hop in a time machine and go back to 2003. I think my favorite part of this song is the singing part Mike has at the beginning, it has this vibe that comes across like he's playfully mocking/gloating to someone who really deserves to get their ass kicked right before karma finally catches up to them. I would normally facepalm at vocal parts like the one Chester has in this song, but I can't really think of anything else that would better suit this song. The inclusion of the rap verse really leaves me scratching my head, but it definitely helps make this song fit the whole "cram the entire Linkin Park style into a song under two minutes" tag that the band seems to have put on it. I honestly can't decide whether this song is filler or totally fucking brilliant...I think LP has finally done a song that I can't quite wrap my head around, so I have to give them credit for that. 7/10 (I'm giving it an average rating for neutrality's sake - I could look at this song one way and rate it as a 3/10, or look at it another way and give it a perfect 10/10. It's THAT weird.) ROADS UNTRAVELED I love the chime-like sounds that this song is built around. This might be LP's best ballad yet. I can honestly say this track gives me a lump in my throat at certain points, and I'm not a person who tends to get emotionally affected by music. I feel like the lack of a real chorus on this song might hurt this song a bit in the eyes of some (LP just did a "wordless chorus" with When They Come For Me on their previous album, after all), but I feel like the verses on this song say a lot, and sometimes it's best not to add words just for the sake of adding words. This is definitely one that I'll be playing a lot. 9/10 SKIN TO BONE Cool instrumental vibe on this song that sets it apart from most of the rest of the album, but I feel like this is one of the weaker tracks on here. I really like Mike's bassy singing voice on the first verse, but I could take or leave a lot of the rest of the track. The second verse has some REALLY cheesy lyrics - "Right to left/left to right, Night to day/day to night?" Really? Did LP decide to write a song based around an elementary school-level exercise on what opposites are? Sheesh. I feel like this is the In Between of this album, it's a song that sounds cool and doesn't necessarily "suck," but it doesn't really seem to go anywhere. Just seems like filler to me...but I still like it more than LIES GREED MISERY. 6/10 UNTIL IT BREAKS I can definitely tell that this song was made up of a few different demos. Mike's best rapping on the album is on this track, but I'm really disappointed that he returned to his obsession with the phrase "like that," a.k.a. 80% of the reason I don't listen to Fort Minor anymore. The tempo change leading into the "Apaches verse" after Chester's part is interesting, it sounded really abrupt the first time I listened to it, but it actually works pretty well now that I've analyzed it a bit more. I really love the contrast between the lo-fi, underground rap sound of Mike's parts, the calm piano ballad style of Chester's part, and the symphonic quality of Brad's part at the end. And how about Brad, by the way? I knew he had a decent voice, but I would've expected both Phoenix and Joe to get a lead vocal part on an album before he did. He actually sounds really good, even on the layered harmonies. I'm curious to see how he'll handle this song when/if the full version is played live. I really don't have anything bad to say about this song, but I bet a lot of people won't like it based on how it jumps between the different parts. 8/10 TINFOIL So, we're back to the Foreword/Don't Stay tactic of splitting one song into two parts to make the album look like it has more songs than it does, huh? This is the intro to POWERLESS, nothing more. Cool instrumental vibe that continues into the following song...I have a feeling the only reason they made this a separate track was to save themselves the trouble of having to make a radio edit version of POWERLESS when it's inevitably released as a single in conjunction with that stupid Abe Lincoln vampire movie. Completely unnecessary. 2/10 POWERLESS Pretty "meh" way to end the album, in my opinion. It's a rather predictable and (surprise) movie soundtrack-esque track. It's a really nice instrumental, particularly starting in the second verse. Also some really nice vocal harmonies on this one, but they aren't enough to redeem the song. The whole thing just sounds really forced to me. It's bland enough that I really can't think of much more to say...which kind of bothers me, usually I'm better at picking out little things about songs that I like and dislike, but this whole track just bores me. 5/10 Final score: 79.5/120, which works out to like 6.6/10, but that doesn't necessarily reflect my overall view of the album. Since TINFOIL and LIES GREED MISERY really brought down the overall rating, I'm gonna say I look at the album as an overall 7.5/10. Good, with some really great moments and some not-so-great ones. I'm just thankful that it didn't end up sounding like 2012's version of Meteora, which I was honestly worried about for a while. Ranking the 5 albums is tough for me. I definitely like Meteora the least, and Hybrid Theory/A Thousand Suns are pretty close competitors for my favorite. Minutes to Midnight and Living Things are obviously at spots 3 and 4 then, but I'm not sure which one would go where.

Until it Breaks is apparently composed of several different demos/seeds that never went anywhere on their own, so they combined a few of them into one song. I'm guessing "Apaches" was one of those incomplete tracks, and that's the section the live WFTE verse comes from.

As long as there's a good chunk of new album stuff and at least SOME of the cool stuff they introduced on the European tour (BIO/Sabotage, With You, and APFMH mainly), I'll be content. I'm not going to be seeing this tour anyway, so I'm not too concerned.

I think the click actually speeds up a couple bars before the break, if you listen really close to the last couple bars of the bridge (..."face this now") the tempo actually starts increasing there.

First 3 clips are Lost in the Echo, Skin to Bone, and Castle of Glass. Not sure what the 4th one is.

Nobody's Listening on the U.S. leg of the Meteora Word Tour in 2004. Didn't happen at every show, but when it did they'd usually start the song with their regular instruments and switch during the second verse.

Sounds more like they just used a different piece of music at the beginning of the video and cross-faded into Divided. Once the part that's actually identifiable as Divided kicks in, it sounds pretty much the same as the original song to me.

There's guitar at the end of Robot Boy, starting after the synth solo. There's guitar starting at the 1:00 mark of Jornada Del Muerto. There's guitar throughout almost all of Waiting For the End, it first enters when Chester's first singing part comes in and continues throughout the rest of the song. The glitch breakdown on Blackout is likely (at least partially) made up of chopped-up guitar samples. The majority of the instrumental portion of Wretches and Kings is made up of chopped-up guitar samples, originally played by Brad and subsequently played by Mike with an MPC. There's guitar between the first chorus and second verse of Iridescent, in addition to the stuff at the end. There's guitar in about 2/3rds of The Catalyst (starting in the second verse and running through the second chorus, the synth break, and the third chorus, then again once the heavy part of the end section comes in). Moral of the story: Listen harder, kthx.

There are basically 3 ways an LP song starts. If it starts off with some kind of sampled part that plays for a while before anything else comes in, Dylan gets a cue from one of the band members when they're ready and starts playback on the Pro Tools rig (this is most common with the long intros the band uses for concert intros - the AMBO intro to What I've Done, the long intro to No More Sorrow, etc.). If it starts off with Rob counting in, Rob will give Dylan a cue to start the click track, then once Rob hears the click, he'll count the rest of the band in (this happens with tracks like Crawling, Bleed it Out, Numb, and a few others). If it starts off with another band member, they'll usually give Dylan the cue and hear the click track instead (most common on tracks where Mike starts them off with piano - What I've Done, the new LOATR/SOTD/Iridescent medley, etc.). There are very few situations in an LP live show where someone isn't playing to a click track. The few exceptions are piano versions of songs where it's just Mike and Chester, and any time Brad starts a song by himself, since he doesn't wear in-ear monitors (ever notice that the A Place For My Head intro always seems slower than the rest of the song? That's because the click track doesn't come in until Mike starts the first verse - this is also the reason for the pause between the intro and the rest of the song). The only "full" song I can think of that's performed entirely without a click track is The Messenger.

...How does that even sound like it could possibly be anything else?

This. 99.9999999999% sure this isn't happening guys.

Jesus fucking christ, sorry I didn't bother obsessively watching live videos to find out when Chester's doing backups and when he isn't. It sounds like 2 voices the entire time on the DSPs, you can't really hear Chester's backups much at all, so I figured he was just doubling Mike the whole time. I was wrong, get the fuck over it. I'm sorry, but saying my musical knoweldge has been "voided" when I've been dedicating my entire fucking LIFE to music for the last 11 years is something I'm going to take pretty fucking personally.

The backing tracks are run off a Pro Tools rig that Dylan has offstage in "monitor world," as Pooch calls it. I'd assume it's the same rig he uses to run all the click tracks and stuff like that, each song is probably loaded as a Pro Tools session with all of the backing tracks getting sent to the FOH console so Pooch can mix everything and the click tracks getting sent to Dylan's console so he can send them to whoever needs to hear them in their monitors (usually Rob, and probably Mike and Joe as well in certain situations).

Live 8 will probably go down as the biggest crowd LP ever plays for - estimates for the Philly show are between 1 and 1.5 million people attending the show at some point throughout the day, with over half a million being present on average at any given time.

...I just hear Chester doubling Mike on the rap vocals, no backing track/"robot voice" or anything like that. Sounds like Chester to me, anyway.

Chester definitely sounded the best in Lisbon, but the band sounded tighter at Pinkpop.

Isn't that what he has mounted on that little "riser" thing at the front center of his rig? I'm talking about the thing that's in the bottom left corner that he uses for the triggered samples on things like the Burn it Down intro.

...With You is titled as "Without You" on the Pinkpop DSP. *facepalm*

More info for you guys! -Rob indeed has two electronic cymbals on his kit now. One is above his rack of trigger pads on his left, the other is under his left-side crash cymbal, right beside his splash. I also noticed that his rack of triggers has shrunk by two, the big rack of 5 triggers built into regular drum shells has shrunk down to 3 (the top row of them was removed, and one of the electronic cymbals was mounted up there). So he still has the same number of electronic components on his kit as he did on the last cycle, just in a different arrangement. -Mike is using Fernandes Sustainer-equipped guitars on Waiting for the End now. The two he's currently using in Europe are both old guitars that Brad used on No More Sorrow (both are CE 24s, one red and one blue), but the one he used at the House of Blues show was a new one, from what I can tell it might be an SE model, since it appears to have a flat top on it. -Brad has two PRS NF3s for With You/Runaway, one is white with a maple fretboard, the other is black with a rosewood fretboard. -Chester's two guitars for Iridescent are a powder blue PRS Mira that he's had for a while, and a black PRS SE One that actually belongs to Mike. -Mike is using a sunburst PRS CE 24 on Somewhere I Belong at some shows, it's a guitar that he's had for a while but rarely used before now (it was usually just a backup guitar in the past). -The white PRS Mike used on Somewhere I Belong at the House of Blues show isn't a Dave Navarro signature model like I thought, it's actually the same white PRS Brad's been using pretty frequently the last few years. Mike must have just borrowed it for that one show, because Brad's using it in Europe. -Chester's "Green Guitar Project" Telecaster-style guitar appears to just have one pickup, and it looks like a Hot Rails or something like that (a single coil-sized humbucker). -I'm not very good with Joe's gear, but I noticed that he's using either an iPad or something that looks a lot like one for all of his "trigger" parts (stuff he would've used an MPC, or something with MPC-style pads for in the past). I wonder what app he's using for that?

I doubt a new set comes into play for Berlin, they wouldn't really have time to rehearse anything drastically different, and their pre-tour rehearsals would've probably focused primarily on the set they've been playing. Since this is the show being filmed for the Living Things movie theater event, I think they'll revert back to opening with Tinfoil (that way they have 3 new songs in the set, plus the Until it Breaks verse), and they'll either move APFMH somewhere else in the set or just use the same set from the House of Blues show.