Review Summary: The title is very misleading.
Linkin Park's career has been rather uneven since 2006. Their efforts past that point have ranged from iffy (
Minutes to Midnight and
Living Things) to well-done (
A Thousand Suns). Most of the content of
Recharged originated from a contest for people to remix songs from
Living Things. The results of that contest were rather lackluster, and thus it made me wonder why they decided to issue an entire official album of amateur remixes. Because this album fails on almost every level.
Of course it's not all bad. The first and only entirely new track "A Light That Never Comes" is a decent by-the-numbers EDM tune. The remixes of "Powerless" and "I'll Be Gone (featuring
Pusha T)" are at least decent enough to possibly merit a second listen. The Rick Rubin Reboot of "A Light That Never Comes" is arguably better than the main version. And when guest rappers do show up, they at least provide a breath of fresh air. Unfortunately, in the case of this album, these are the exception rather than the rule.
Living Things is already one of Linkin Park's weakest records. However, most of the remixes make the song far worse than it was originally. There is a different producer on each track, but you would never know that from the way they sound. All of them sound exactly the same: like a bunch of second-rate
Skrillex wannabes. The only thing they do is produce a repetitive mix of random splicing, unnecessary repetition, and bass drops. Just when you think they might actually try something different, they go straight back to the bass drops again. Then they repeat the same word five times before moving to the next section, which consists of more spliced audio repetition, and then once again move back to more bass drops.
The outside producers are the ones primarily responsible for the weakness of
Recharged, however, they are not the only guilty parties. Mike Shinoda contributes two remixes for "Castle of Glass" and "Victimized." You would expect that he would know what to do with his own song, but he doesn't do a very good job either. On "Castle of Glass", the track is drawn out from a three minute song to a six minute song, without anything good on the track warranting such an extension. "Victimized" is even worse, being so badly done that it's legitimately painful to listen to, taking all the bad things about dubstep and turning them up to eleven.
Recharged is an album that, by logic, should not exist. The band unfortunately failed to see how poor of a job the producers did, and the producers themselves failed to realize that they were appealing to every dubstep cliché in the book. Unless you wish to assure your hate of dubstep, avoid this album.
