When I was 11 years old, Linkin Park were the epitome of cool and as time went on I found that their future releases were better than debut album Hybrid Theory. The collaboration with Jay-Z was inescapably good, while second album Meteora featured an incredibly good instrumental piece called ‘Session’ (also featured on a soundtrack to The Matrix Reloaded). After a mediocre live album and the poorly received Minutes To Midnight, I eventually grew out of Linkin Park. Yet I still greeted the release of A Thousand Suns with slight excitement. Maybe, I thought, they’d suddenly become amazing again. Maybe they’d tap into the pop-rock-rap brilliance of their collaboration with Jay-Z. Or perhaps release an overbearing instrumental epic like an expanded ‘Session’.

It seems that my excitement was misplaced. Writing about the album, Linkin Park said “We were not making an album” and that “Each track felt like a hallucination.” Both of these statements are true. The album jutters from track to track with occasional short pieces of sampled spoken words played over atmospheric chords giving an altogether disjointed feeling. Having spoken about not wanting to record a conventional album, this may be what the band were aiming for. The hallucinatory feeling invoked by the music is reminiscent of a Bill Bailey sketch in which he described an LSD trip where he stares at a camping chair at Glastonbury for eight hours, bored.

It’s a shame that Linkin Park no longer produce the same attention grabbing music that made them famous. They were able to make different styles of music on their second album with fantastic results, completely contrasting their first. Then they managed to mix a brilliant collaborative album with the worlds number one rapper. So why are they unable to produce the goods now?

The album is clearly that of a band experimenting with sounds and ideas so kudos has to be given for trying new approaches to both writing and recording. The feeling of experimentation even led one MTV journalist to call it “their Kid A“.

Though I wouldn’t agree.