Singles Roundup: Linkin Park, Opeth, & Neal Morse

Well, this week kicks off with one I didn't know we'd ever have to discuss.

Linkin Park - The Emptiness Machine

First thing first; I was never a Linkin Park fan. I hear the radio songs, but never more than that, and even those songs didn't mean much to me. I don't have a deep and emotional connection to them like so many people do, so my perspective is entirely that of an outsider. Having said that, Linkin Park reforming as an entity making new music is without a doubt the biggest surprise of the year. I didn't know if it was possible to come back from their loss, or if it was advisable to even consider such a thing. I'm not saying they should or shouldn't, but merely that it is a risk you have to be ready to take on. They apparently are.

My first impression of the song is that they found the right singer to join them. Her voice is just different enough to make clear she isn't Chestor Bennington, and yet the strained tone of her voice hits the exact same marks. It almost doesn't matter what the song is, because it sounds right.

And yet, the song also comes with the emptiness of knowing why it exists as it does, and why it has been so long since Linkin Park made music. It sits in a limbo that will take time to sort through, and I don't know which direction that will go. There are already questions being raised about certain ties to certain things, but I'm not going to address them here. I'm content to leave things at this; Linkin Park released a song that sounds very much like Linkin Park, and I don't know what to make of that.

Opeth - S3

So much for those growls. After making waves with the return of their death metal side, Opeth pulls the rug out from under those people with a return to their neo-prog side on this second single. I was a dissenting voice in not thinking S1 was any good, and I feel justified in that thinking having now heard this song. They are similar compositions, but without the novelty of the growling vocals, the flatness of Akerfeldt's vocal lines are put to the forefront.

Not only is there nothing close to an interesting melody to be found, but his vocal performance is lackluster as well. He no longer seems to have any power at all to his voice, cooing with extra effects put on in post-production to cover up for this fact. If recapturing his growl meant losing his clean voice, it was not a trade worth making. Prestige tv has a problem of thinking that being slow and ponderous means you have said something important, when all you have done is wasted time saying nothing. Opeth is squarely in that reality.

Neal Morse & The Resonance - All The Rage

The good news here is that Neal has recruited a new group of musicians to make a prog album, which means this song is already miles better than his awful two-part Joseph concept album. The bad news is that this new group sounds exactly like the now-on-hiatus Neal Morse Band. The music is pure Neal, with all of his usual tropes. That's fine. The production sounds exactly like Neal, down to the frustrating slathering of effects on every vocal. Again, expected. The players he has selected for this, though, sound like copies. The playing is all in the same box, and the vocals not done by Neal sound very much like Eric Gillette's contributions on the NMB records. That all adds up to say this feels more like a placeholder for a band that was forced into taking a break, rather than a new band that has something of its own to say. Perhaps the rest of the album will prove otherwise, but this is a disappointing way to introduce something new.