Linkin Park - Over Each Other
One Step Closer to the wrong direction.
The third single from Linkin Park’s comeback album “From Zero” is a huge dropoff from the fantastic first two singles, “The Emptiness Machine” and especially “Heavy Is The Crown”. It’s far from the worst track ever; it’s not even close to being the worst Linkin Park song ever; but “Over Each Other” has three main issues for me.
The first issue is that there’s absolutely no impact. One of the main assets of Linkin Park at their best is their ability to build tension in a way that makes for electric beat drops, on choruses, bridge breakdowns or otherwise. Here, though, the build-ups are so flat and unimpressive, that the track completely loses that electricity of the drop. The closest it comes is the final chorus, but even then it falls short.
The second issue is a fairly obvious one - the complete absence of Mike Shinoda. I’m not trying to be unnecessarily negative towards Emily Armstrong - I think she’s been handling vocal duties very well so far. Her vocal performance on this song is good, too. But she just isn’t able to keep me magnetized to an entire song on her own like the late great Chester Bennington was. Therefore, I believe it’s crucial for, in their current form, Linkin Park songs to feature both Emily and Mike; Mike is a more charismatic presence, and has more conviction both in his rapping and his melodic singing. Here, though, Emily definitely tries her best, but, with this song being very clean and not even featuring any aggressive segments, the spark is just not there. Maybe if they’d let her scream on the bridge, it could’ve worked out. But, as is, it unfortunately doesn’t.
And finally, arguably the biggest problem - this doesn’t sound like Linkin Park. Even when they went more pop in 2017 with “One More Light”, some things in the music still made it recognizably them to me. This, however, sounds like something ripped straight from generic pop rock radio, with a rather shocking absence of the band’s personality. It’s inoffensive, it’s clean, it’s polished - but it’s too much all of those things, not leaving any room for Linkin Park to be themselves.
If I was to point out some positives - new member Colin Brittain does some solid work on drums, the guitar tones are pretty nice when they finally do properly appear on the last chorus, and Emily does sing quite well, though, again, lacks a bit of presence. Apart from that, though, “Over Each Other” is a severe disappointment, and a pretty concerning sign. I am going to try and maintain optimism for “From Zero”, because for now we are 2-1 on the singles. Hopefully this is an outlier, and nothing else on the album sounds like it.
4.5/10