Artist: Linkin Park

Title: A Thousand Suns

Label: Warner Brothers

For an album that takes its central conceit from nuclear destruction, Linkin Park's A Thousand Suns is surprisingly optimistic. A concept album reuniting the California alt-rockers with uber-producer Rick Rubin, Suns meditates on the sources of destruction, both personal and global. And it still rocks. Carefully.

On this, the band's fourth studio album, it's clear immediately the status quo is not in play. The liner notes claim "destroying and rebuilding our band" as the goal, but Suns is not an exercise in sonic deconstruction, a la Radiohead's Kid A. It's more of a reinvention. Linkin Park's style has diversified over the years, leading to Suns, an album of ambient sounds, milder vocal deliveries, and complicated combinations of beats. In fact, the album is so well-crafted in its modesty that when a Hybrid Theory-era track like "Blackout" surfaces midway through, with vocalist Chester Bennington's primal scream on the chorus, it's jarringly out of place.

Instead of songs being formed around one musical idea, as were megahits "Numb" or "Crawling," these tracks evince hours of trial and error in the studio."Burning in the Skies" features a gorgeous, soaring melody atop a chugging bass line, and "When They Come for Me" bounces along with a choppy, multi-track rhythm line and an experimental, Middle Eastern vocal. The most successful example of this sonic exploration is lead single "The Catalyst," which is sampled earlier in the album, but fully realized on the penultimate track. The lyrics seem gloom and doom -" God save us everyone/When we burn inside the fires of a thousand suns/For the sins of our hands" - but at its bleakest moment, the song is rescued by Bennington asking, "Lift me up, let me stand" in counterpoint above this mantra. Two other standout tracks, "Irridescent" and "Waiting for the End" arrive at a place of encouragement, with the former instructing,"remember all the sadness and frustration/and let it go."

A Thousand Suns is Exhibit A for why the album still matters as an art form. Few of these songs feel like hot iTunes downloads, but those willing to buy the whole (gasp!) album will find a unified, tightly focused body of work that's as strong as anything the band has produced to date.