Review Summary: Puerta de Alcala is exactly how a live concert should not sound.
Last year Linkin Park released their long anticipated album
A Thousand Suns. On this record they drifted even farther away from the long lost nu-metal roots of their first and second release than any LP fan could have ever imagined when they first succumbed to the hype and bought
Hybrid Theory. The more experimental and mainstream approach of their two latest efforts couldn't have been more different from their older days, but this is exactly the kind of clash of sounds you will experience when listening to their latest offering,
Puerta de Alcala, a live EP which features tracks from both time periods.
There are many things wrong with this EP but the biggest mistake that was made here, apart from releasing this thing, was the poor track choice. As I said before, Linkin Park has two faces, and the mainstream approach clearly has the upper hand on this one. That might seem as pretty logical, given that they want the public to be familiar with their newer style. However, their track choice is a little odd, considering that they put New Divide (and What I've Done) on this which is easily one of the worst tracks they have ever come up with. New Divide represents everything that is wrong with the 'modern' Linkin Park. Catchy, but void of any interesting aspects, desperately clinging on to that one climax called 'the chorus'. Well, they managed to make the song sound even worse on this EP! What they did was this: they totally drained any kind of life that was present in the song made it completely uninteresting. Well, it was to expected from a song that was meant to accompany one of the worst movies of all time, Transformers 2, but you would think that they would at least try to give it a little twist to keep the whole experience interesting, but instead they turned it into a bland and lifeless mess.
Bland and lifeless, that is exactly what you could call this whole EP. Linkin Park clearly had no clue at all how to put on a decent show, if this EP is an actual representation of how their live shows really sound like. The main problem here is that they either didn't think through how they would actually play the songs live like on 'Waiting for The End' and 'The Catalyst', or they just end up sounding like bastardized, weakened versions of their respective studio versions like the fan favourite 'In The End'. 'Waiting for the End' and 'The Catalyst' show that the band had no clue how to bring any of the songs on
A Thousand Suns on stage without those oh-so-great studio effects, so in the end they just sound clumsy and stripped down. This is a shame, because these songs had a lot of potential, but their execution seriously lacks heart.
This EP is a combination of bad track choices, an overall bland performance by the band and a clueless live adaptation of some great songs. Honestly, I could talk on and on about how weak and uninspired (and off-key) the performance of the band actually is, especially the guy behind the turntables, but it would all come down to the same thing in the end. It sounds like a goddamn mess.
Puerta de Alcala should be used as a guide for other bands: 'How to totally ruin the live experience' by Linkin Park.
