“Not trying to be dramatic/Just thinking out loud/I’m just trying to make some sense in my mind,” raps Mike Shinoda, most famously of Linkin' Park, on ‘Feel Like Home’. At least he acknowledges the indulgence of this album, a solo record in all but name.
It seems that Mike’s got a chip or two on his shoulder, and his heavies – including members of The Roots, Cypress Hill and Jay-Z, who is “executive producer” – are on hand to right a few wrongs that would be too personal to mention in his Linkin Park overalls. If it passed the quality bar. Which it doesn’t.
From Linkin' Park’s faultless formula – driven rock/hip-hop with a frontline interplay of Mike’s rapping in the verses and Chester Bennington’s epic choruses – he’s taken a slice and tried to stretch it into a whole. But it’s not happening, not least because somewhere along the way he seems to have forgotten how to rap. Instead he spouts out junior school poetry with couplets matching “rhyme” and “time”, and a syllable ratio that’s the hip-hop equivalent of fitting a square into a circle. And that’s not even considering the beats, which drone rather than stimulate. Though some are better (‘Believe In’) and others worse (‘Get Me Gone’) than the album’s average, put together it’s distinctly lacking in life.