Album Review: Recharged by Linkin Park

Like the first Linkin Park remix album -- Reanimation, which arrived over a decade prior -- Recharged offers reworked versions of an entire LP, this time 2012's Living Things. Ten years is a long time and in 2013, it is perfectly acceptable for a hard rock band to give themselves over entirely to electronic dance music -- or, more accurately, EDM, and, in particular, its most visible variation, dubstep (in 2011, Korn did a whole new album of dubstep, in fact). There are a couple of big names here -- Pusha T shows up on "I'll Be Gone," Dirtyphonics remixes "Lies Greed Misery," Money Mark comes in for "Until It Breaks" -- but a lot of this is kept in-house, with Mike Shinoda doing a few remixes and LP producer Rick Rubin "rebooting" "A Light That Never Comes.

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If further proof was needed that America’s mutant dubstep and electro offspring EDM is nu-metal’s successor, I give you this, the second album to feature remixes of songs written by one the genre’s biggest bands. It features producers with names like Datsik (on ‘Until It Breaks’), KillSonik (on ‘Lost In The Echo’) and Enferno (on ‘Powerless’), who clobber songs mostly taken from Linkin Park’s fifth album ‘Living Things’ with nosebleed drum’n’bass, 8-bit blips and oversized dancehall bass until they sound like a wailing ogre having a seizure. Rick Rubin’s final Primal Scream-gone-hip-hop remix of ‘A Light That Never Comes’ saves ‘Recharged’ from disaster, but you might need resuscitating after this lot.

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There's a built-in redundancy to a Linkin Park remix album. Their music already sounds like hard rock that's been tweaked by a knowledgable 15-year-old on his first laptop, and I'm fairly certain that dozens (if not hundreds) of bootleg remixes of their songs already exist on YouTube, mashed up against MMA highlights and PG-rated clips from True Blood. (Note: we're not bothering to verify that.

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