Album: Linkin Park

Meteora, Warner Bros

You might think it foolish to plan even an evening's entertainment around Limp Bizkit, but Linkin Park seem to have based their entire style, world-view and career on Fred Durst's band; their debut album, Hybrid Theory, only went and sold 14 million copies, so who's the fool now? Named after a Greek clifftop monastery, whose "timelessness and expansiveness" the band hoped to recreate – no, honestly – the follow-up, Meteora, is an impressively single-minded assault on the vast (white) American youth-protest market, featuring the same tried-and-tested gripe-hop mix of fuzz-guitar riffs, DJ scratching and bawled complaints about, well, nothing much. They themselves admit as much: "I don't know what's worth fighting for/ Or why I have to scream," Chester Bennington screams in "Breaking the Habit" – which features a comparatively thoughtful arrangement of strings, piano and guitar. Elsewhere, the crunching, declamatory rap-metal riffs dominate proceedings, as Bennington and the rapper Mike Shinoda confront the existential void in track after track. Confusion reigns, as the fear of losing one's character, or of being smothered by a partner, that underlies songs such as "Numb", "Figure.09" and "Hit the Floor" is flatly contradicted in others by lines such as: "I will never be anything till I break away from me." But one probably shouldn't seek consistency in adolescent complaint.