California hip-hop-metal-rock act Linkin Park brought some much needed warmth to Toronto's Air Canada Centre on Tuesday night, drawing the huddled masses - an impressive 11,500 people - to the hockey hangar on a bitterly cold night.
It was the first major rock show in T.O. of 2011 with plenty of lights, loud sound, black-and-white and colour images and footage projected onto a triangular screen, a large, triangular stage, and a crowd full of fist-pumping head-bangers.
And all I can say after a sluggish mid-December and January on the concert scene, it’s about time even if the material wasn’t uniformly top notch.
Linkin Park produces a big, dramatic and moody rock sound but sometimes it all sounds the same. Even so they’ve managed to sell 50 million albums worldwide since their 2000 debut, Hybrid Theory.
The band arrived in town on the latest leg of their so-called A Thousand Suns tour named after their 2010 fourth album, co-produced by vocalist-rapper-keyboardist Mike Shinoda and studio legend Rick Rubin.
“It’s really great to be back here in Toronto - thanks you guys for supporting us tonight,” said lead singer Chester Bennington, he of the shaved head and fantastic shrieking vocals.
“There’s a lot of good-looking people out here tonight!” he added earlier in the 95-minute show.
If you say so, but it was kind of hard to see although a Canadian flag draped over the front of the stage was highly visible.
The first big response of the night - after a very warm one for Hybrid’s Papercut featuring Shinoda rapping away - came for the piano-driven What I’ve Done, from 2007’s third album, Minutes to Midnight, which prompted a major clap-along from the crowd.
Still, the follow-up tune, A Thousand Suns’ percussive-heavy When They Come For Me, which featured Bennington on drums too, was nicely over the top, and yet more clapping greeted another Minutes song, No More Sorrow, and the new tunes, Waiting For The End, Burning In The Skies (the group’s latest single), and The Catalyst.
But it was Linkin Park’s mega-hit Numb from 2003’s second album, Meteroa, that probably went over best followed by two other tunes from that record, Breaking The Habit, and Faint, plus Hybrid Theory’s Crawling.
When they came back for the encore, the sextet drummed up yet more enthusiastic responses for the slow-building new tune, Iridescent.
It began with just Shinoda singing and on electric piano before Bennington and the rest of the band - bearded and big-haired lead guitarist Brad Delson (standing in the backline and wearing headphones), drummer Rob Bourdon, bassist Dave “Phoenix” Farrell - to whom we all sang Happy Birthday Fifi (Bennington’s nickname for him) - and turntablist Joe Hahn kicked the song into high gear.
Three other standout moments came at the very end with the Minutes tunes, Shadow Of The Day - Bennington urged: “I really need to hear you sing on this song. Pretend it’s church on Sunday and you guys are the choir,” - and Bleed It Out, and Hybrid’s In The End.
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Linkin Park
Air Canada Centre
Tuesday night
