It was just a momentary whim as I walked by the new CD releases and thought, hmmm, I really liked Minutes to Midnight. So, having heard exactly zero songs off A Thousand Suns, I just bought it.

How to describe the impact of this collection of music/art? It is transcendent, lyrical, raw, devastated, mythic, atonal, grinding, pervasive, inward, screaming, absolute, discrete...I love it more than I can know.

I kind of gave up on music awhile back. I wasn't listening to much of anything, anymore. Nothing grabbed me by the scruff of the neck. At home instead of music, I listened to silence, and whatever ambient noises there happened to be...birds outside, cars driving by, some guy yelling at his kids, just whatever, whatever. In the car, mostly movie scores, or soundtracks with only instrumentals on them...nobody was writing words I cared about hearing. I found Minutes to Midnight and Linkin Park purely at random. I liked them, and actually decided to start listening to music again.

These guys, these artists...they GET it. They put themselves out there, and share so very clearly the pulse of their souls, and the noise that makes up our world as well as our interior psyche, here and now. "A Thousand Suns" struck me as the first real epic album in the past several decades. It is the kind of thing that will lock into your mind, that will play in your inner ipod day and night and day, changing how you perceive who you are, what life means, or anything else that can only be achieved in an altered state. It is in the best and real sense of the phrase, mind-blowing. The last album that hit me with such impact was Pink Floyd's "The Wall". There are parallels in scope and feel, in the sense that this is a catalyst, some kind of turning point. I can't even explain it. But although "The Wall" was designed as a concept album and "A Thousand Suns" was not...it is, anyway.

Wow, I love it!!!!