Linkin Park - Minutes to Midnight 1/2

LINKIN PARK - Time to get really, really serious.

The signs that SoCal's Linkin Park, perhaps the most creative band to come out of the nü-metal movement of the last decade, is taking itself way too seriously are all over its long-awaited third full-length CD, Minutes to Midnight. Start with the black-and-white jacket photos depicting the six band members in near-silhouette against a stark outdoor background, standing apart from each other and gazing in different directions. Anton Corbijn, who shot virtually identical photos for U2 in the '80s, should sue. As with U2 of that era, the photos seem to be saying, "We have weighty things on our minds."

Inside, lengthy notes on the band's creative process introduce the album, and the lyrics are accompanied by notes that seem to be advocating for the profundity and importance of each song by spotlighting the amount of work that went into it instead of letting it speak for itself.

There's certainly a lot riding on this album. The follow-up to 2000's 18-million-selling Hybrid Theory and 2003's Meteora, it comes after a period of turmoil between the band and its label, with the band claiming itself as a key factor in the label's viability. If a listener does let the songs do their own thing, he's bound to conclude it's not a bad effort from the gifted band, which blends hip-hop, metal and rock elements more effortlessly than any other such act and perfected the contrast of rap and sung vocals, although he might also conclude that, after a four-year wait, it's anticlimactic.

One of the genre's stock tricks is the contrast of driving, rhythmic, staccato parts with lush, flowing, melodic segments and, on tracks like "Given Up," Linkin Park shows it still handles this move well, even if it seems more formulaic now than it did seven years ago. It also succumbs a bit too often to the radio-friendly nü-metal power ballad format on tracks like "Leave Out All the Rest" and "What I've Done," earnest, "sensitive" songs seemingly designed to impress the girls with how much in touch with their feelings the guys are.

But there are tracks scattered throughout this disc that break the format with excellent results. The raucous, jolting "Bleed It Out" is insanely catchy, over-the-top energetic, and positively cathartic, while "Hands Held High" rides on a tightly coiled, pattering rap vocal whose release is not the expected explosion of uptempo guitar rock but rather an eerie swell of pipe organ over strings that sounds almost like a choir singing "amen." It's one of a number of tracks to use unexpected sonic touches in the arrangement, including strings, percussion and subtle sampled effects, and a striking accent to a song that lyrically takes the band in a new direction, dealing openly with the state of the world rather than the state of their own emotions.

But they still do that as well on tracks like "Valentine's Day" and "In Between." And they bring both approaches together on the album's closing track, "The Things You Give Away," which conflates the destruction following Hurricane Katrina with drowning in inner turmoil.