- Critic score
- Publication
- By date
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Most of Minutes is honed, metallic pop with a hip-hop stride and a wake-up kick.
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BlenderThere's no great leap into maturity... They've kept their salient feature--scorching, adolescent tantrums--unchanged. [Jun 2007, p.109]
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Whatever else it is, Linkin Park's third studio record is a nu-metal record at heart.
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SpinThe music privileges texture over catchiness. [Jun 2007, p.97]
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This is the kind of music artists make to find out who they'll become next: It reaches toward many influences — notably U2 (some songs invoke the Irish rock group almost note-for-note), but also Tool, Evanescence, Nirvana and Coldplay — without committing to anything.
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The California rap-rockers are stymied by their decision to stay roughly within the shrieky boundaries of their genre (albeit with less emphasis on the rap).
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We've heard a lot of this despair before.
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Amid the stabs at growth, every new effect sounds borrowed.
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As you might imagine, the band’s emo makeover doesn’t always go smoothly.
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These half-arsed stabs at nu-AOR end up pleasing no one, least of all the band itself.
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BillboardLinkin Park's ambitions are nearly palpable, but songs likely conceived as homages end up sounding too close to their sources. [26 May 2007]
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While more than half the album flounders and meanders uselessly to arrive at roughly four truly worthwhile numbers, parts of Minutes to Midnight set the foundations for a whole new array of sounds that the band can and hopefully will pursue in the future.
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The shift in subject matter cannot disguise Linkin Park’s acute lack of creativity.
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Try as they might to sound different, or even to touch on issues bigger than their own narcissistic garbage, LP still sound like they're stuck back in 00, which is where they should have stayed.
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What follows is the sound of a band trying and failing to forge a new identity - boy-band balladry, U2-style stadium rock and Metallica-esque melodic crunch are all attempted with predictably patchy results.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 494 out of 733
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Mixed: 107 out of 733
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Negative: 132 out of 733
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Jan 10, 2012
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Jul 25, 2018
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Apr 11, 2012