Sometimes, I need to remember just to breathe

Continuing my trip back through the 2003 album charts.

06/04/03 : Meteora - Linkin Park


I quite liked Hybrid Theory but never explored any further offerings from Linkin Park because I had a strong suspicion they weren't going to bring anything new to the party. I'm perfectly happy to listen to this, but am expecting it to be very inessential.

Yeah - inessential is a fair enough comment. Provided you don't mind the general sound (which I don't, but I quite understand that others hate it) then all the tracks are fine, but a whole album of it gets very tiresome and there's absolutely no sign of any musical evolution. And that's about all I've got to say about it really.

We're at #3 in the charts this week on their second week of a fully undeserved 35 week run, with it having peaked at a fully undeserved #1. Amazingly, it's also managed runs in '07, '08, '17, '21, '23 and '24 - I've absolutely no idea what's was going on there. The rest of the top five were The White Stripes (a new entry), Norah Jones, Simply Red and Coldplay and the next highest new entry was Mis-teeq (#6).

Wikipedia has a lot on the album (343 milliPeppers) and I'm a bit intrigued as to what they found to say about it, but not intrigued enough to actually read it - although I did learn that the name refers to some Greek Orthodox monasteries which are in a very cool location. It's their second album and basically they wrote it, recorded it - and then milked it to death. The critics were generally positive although many noted "the album's musical style was similar to its predecessor" - amusingly, Q called it "less an artistic endeavor than an exercise in target marketing", which feels pretty much on the money for me. Whatever I or the critics thought, it did well commercially, getting to #1 in most countries and selling 16 million copies globally which is coincidentally pretty much the same as Avril Lavigne (which is considerably more deserving of the attention).

"Customers also listened to" Dead By Summer, Mike Shinoda, Evanescence and Grey Daze - not a group I know much about thankfully (although Evanescence's offering this year wasn't bad at all). And this isn't terrible, but it's also not exactly great unless you're a hardcore nu-metal fan - which obviously plenty of people were back in those heady days.

30/03/03 - Surprisingly listenable but perfectly inessential
13/04/03 - Considerably more bearable than expected

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