By: Silver Kosmos
Genesis
Noise Floor is a new monthly blog post for 88.7 The Pulse, where I take a look into my favorite alternative albums and rave about what makes me love them! Feel free to recommend your own directly to me at NoiseFloor4@gmail.com and you might just see your favorite get the attention it deserves.
Album Overview
This month’s album is Hybrid Theory, by Linkin Park. This was their debut album, released 25 years ago in 2000. It combined hard rock grit with hip hop influences. Rap verses and DJ samples laid atop gnarly guitar riffs created a never-before heard style. The two vocalists Chester Bennington and Mike Shinoda were as different as they were synergistic; Chester had a proficiency in screams and other vocal distortions, making up the choruses of many of their best songs. On the other hand, Mike had a very consistent flow, and often rapped his parts instead of singing them. This combination of a primarily staccato voice and a primarily legato voice worked perfectly to include more polarity in the album; By switching between mellower and more stripped down verses with high energy choruses they created very dynamic songs.
These factors combined with their very prominent bridge writing, made this album explode in popularity, peaking at number 2 on the US Billboard top 200. The RIAA recognizes 12 million sold copies, making it qualify as Platinum 12x. With how big it is you have probably heard a few songs off it! The album is 38 minutes long and finds itself labeled as genres like Nu Metal, Rap Rock, or otherwise just Alternative metal and rock.
A Worldwide Hit | In The End
In the End is no doubt the most well known song on the album. Its memorable piano sample and scratch effects make it recognizable from the first few seconds. The song is gritty, thanks especially to the scratches and the effects on Mike’s voice. His verses are bitchrushed, cut, and delayed, to sound glitchy.
The verses are very rhythmic, which is contrasted by the chorus Chester leads out. If I could say one word about the chorus, I would simply call it powerful. Whole note chords in the guitar and Chester singing out with all his heart is all this song needs and that’s exactly what it provides. It has a very strong bridge too. By using the same words and melody twice in a row, in a different musical context, it mimics the duality of the verse and chorus. All the while it builds the tension needed to drag the song back into the final chorus wrapping it up perfectly.
My favorite parts of the song include the audio processing on Mike’s vocals, and in the verses when both say the same words at the same time. This song to me encapsulates the main musical ideas of the album while keeping it very catchy and palatable, causing such widespread popularity despite the more alternative album it comes from.
Personal Favorite | By Myself
By myself is the best song off the album in my opinion, and it’s always stuck in my head. This isn’t as popular of an opinion though, as on youtube music it has the second lowest plays on the whole album. Despite this unpopularity it still catches my eye by being undeniably unique.
Right off the bat it just kicks you into it with a super aggressive riff on the guitar, with a super distorted percussion sound on the second beat of every 4 beat measure. I’m all for the full throttle approach this song does, and it really commits… Commits until the complete drop before every verse!
This album is about polarity, and this is its thesis statement. Every chorus cuts away right before the last word can even be sung, almost like Chester got abandoned. And guess what the song is about… He’s by himself!
I haven’t even talked about the chorus itself yet. The prechorus is that aggressive segment teased in the beginning, but now with a back and forth of the two singers, with Chester screaming his lungs out on the same beat as the distorted snare. It’s very fast and builds a lot of tension, and that tension goes so well into the choruses sung by Chester. With how explosive the prechorus is, the chorus only needs to kick into legato and ride out the energy.
The bridge is absolutely exceptional too. It drops in energy like the verses, but it goes even lower. Like a metaphorical rock bottom. You have no choice but to feel incredibly tense, until it all explodes into an alternate prechorus. I didn’t notice the instrumentation was so similar in my first few listens because the tension provided by the lowest low makes it feel like you’ve been slingshot into the stratosphere of release. I absolutely love what this song has done and I’ve never heard anything quite like it.
For my favorite parts, I’ve already mentioned this, but I have a thousand compliments to the overall structure. It’s got the same push and pull as most of the album, but cranked up to the extreme. I also really love how each singer gets a section. Mike gets the verse, Chester gets most of the chorus, and they share the prechorus. It really shows off the best of each of their abilities alone and together. I really like the back and forth of the two singers, and this song executes that exchange best out of any other song on the album, or dare I say the whole discography.
Hidden Gem | A Place For My Head
When I first listened to this album, I brushed past this song as ordinary. But I wouldn’t write about it today if I still thought that.
This song is catchy. After hearing it, the riff is going to be drilled into your mind for the next few hours. It plays on loop for most of the song but avoids going old by everything going on around it. It’s palm muted in the intro, once you go into the verse with Mike it’s no longer palm muted raising the energy a bit. Then in the chorus with Chester the tone fills out even more and it sounds like it switches to power chords. This makes the same riff sound very different even though it’s almost the same.
Let me tell you how much I love the bridge. A cut to silence, with tension building whispers, just like by myself. However this time it’s all Chester’s zone, and after the build up he’s released and yells out the next lines. All the while the repetition builds even more power into it.
That’s all fun but did you think one alternate section was enough for them? Of course not right after the final chorus they throw you into another segment, with the guitars and drums building up again. It wraps off that song with Mike singing familiar words over a different instrumentation and Chester screaming overtop for a few bars until it all shuts down as a dramatic halt.
The Perfect Intro | Papercut
The penultimate song to wrap up the blog is Papercut, the first song on the album. With a play count of 500 million it is the third most popular, behind the other biggest hits In The End and Crawling, which even more general audiences have likely heard. This song introduces the album, and to some, the entire artist, so it has high expectations to reach.
It starts off with DJ scratches and samples, to immediately tell you this isn’t a normal rock album. It’s a very fast song, however the verse riff is noticeably empty. Pulling your attention directly to Mike’s vocals, which are processed just like In the End.
Breaking one pattern of the album, the chorus sung by Chester is relatively staccato. It also bleeds into the verse, keeping a constant forward motion in the song. This song feels fast and that overlap makes it roll.
I wouldn’t be writing about it today, if it weren’t for my absolute favorite part. You get a stripped down bridge right after the middle of the song, which builds momentum and crescendos into an absolutely breathtaking piece, I’ll call it an alternate chorus. It’s the first real long, legato and harmonized part of this song. But it doesn’t stop there, as after its introduction it fuses with the original chorus layering into this stack of sound. It’s very dramatic, and it lets go of all the momentum built up by the first half of the song and just rides the wave. In this finale of the start it wraps up cold, letting you sit mesmerized in awe for a second, before the album continues.
I believe this song perfectly sets the stage for the album, showing off each of the parts without specializing too far into each member’s ability. And the ending bridge and chorus is so phenomenal that I keep playing the song just to hear that finale again. Every time I play hybrid theory is a good time, especially with this fantastic intro.
Rewind and Review
Overall I love how the album sets a pattern and fills out several different ways that can be composed. Another favorite of mine is how the first three songs set the stage. As mentioned for Papercut, it does an overall setup, while the next song One Step Closer surprises the listener with the first screams of the album in the bridge, and the third song, With You, shows off Joe Hahn’s DJ skill like no other, right off the bat with a very bold intro. If this sounds like your jam: I’d recommend you check out those two as well.
After these intro songs it continues to show you new ideas, but without many big surprises kept until the very end. The order of an album matters more than most might think, and this album has arranged the songs almost perfectly, especially near the front.
Wild Card | Cure For The Itch
Cure for the Itch is the wild card pick of November. This song is a radical shift from the rest of the album, as it’s just Joe Hahn showing off his disc jockey skills. It’s a fun little surprise so it makes the perfect choice for the wild card.
I love the stage it sets in the beginning, with the dialogue, and I love a minute in when the piano chords and the strings are brought in. He keeps the song interesting the whole way through with constant flourishes that never get old.
Ribbon Bow
That’s all for the month! Check back in on December 4th for the next issue. If you leave a recommendation at NoiseFloor4@gmail.com it might just be an album you love! Have an amazing November and a perfect Thanksgiving season.
