Reviewed by Ian Phillips.
By Mike Shinoda, Warner Bros. Records 2018.
Mike Shinoda is best known as the co-lead singer with the rock band Linkin Park and this album is his deeply personal response to the death of his fellow co-singer Chester Bennington.
In the months after Bennington’s passing, Shinoda withdrew from the public and with no agenda at all, started writing, recording and painting as a way of processing his grief.
The first results of the process occurred in January when he released the Post Traumatic EP consisting of three highly personal songs, each one a powerful, stream-of-consciousness expression of unvarnished grief.
They were accompanied with homemade visuals that Shinoda filmed, painted, and edited himself.
The response to the release was extremely positive and Shinoda continued to process and create, resulting in the release of this full-length (16 track) album.
Shinoda is quick to explain that the album is a journey out of grief and darkness and not into it. It’s an album about healing.
The disc opens with an appropriately titled track, Place To Start.
The track ends with a series of phone messages left for Mike by friends offering their condolences and support.
Then follows a series of songs that chronicle his journey through shock, grief, sadness, anger and onwards towards acceptance.
The song titles alone give some indication of this journey: Place To Start, Over Again, Watching As I Fall, Nothing Makes Sense Anymore, About You, Brooding, Promises I can’t Keep, Crossing A Line, Hold It Together, Ghosts, Make It Up As I go, Lift Off, IOU, Running From My Shadow, World’s On Fire, Can’t Hear You Now.
The journey through grief is one of the most powerful emotions we will experience in our lives and as a songwriter Mike Shinoda naturally turned to the most obvious way he could process his anguish.
The tracks are reverberant dirges; the rhymes, heading into sung choruses, testify to bewilderment, mourning, resentment, self-pity, and questions about what to do.
He says; ”if people have been through something similar, I hope they feel less alone. If they haven’t been through this, I hope they feel grateful.”
This is a thought-provoking album.
