Linkin Park heats up a cold Philly night

The only thing more bracing than the cold snap outside the Wells Fargo Center on Monday night was the sound of cold steel inside it.

Linkin Park - last and best of alterna-metal's rap-rock wave - have been doing what they do for 15 years now. They know what makes their audience gleeful. While beardo instrumentalist Mike Shinoda raps in a flat, masculine monotone, buzzed-to-the-scalp singer Chester Bennington screeches. They trade vocal lines. The band rages with the machines - the roar of clean, crunching, overprocessed guitars and racing beats.

If that were all Linkin Park did, they'd still be overwhelmingly awesome. Monday, they nailed their usual to the wall. Bennington hit the frantic "Faint" yelling, "I won't be ignored." The band unleashed a white-hot howl after Shinoda's speedy MC bit. In the swaggeringly diabolical "Lying From You," the vocalists traded hard-hurt lyrical lines.

But Linkin Park transcend expectations; that's what makes them such an enviable prospect. Their audience was happily multicultural, massive (the show was nearly sold out), and rewarded for its devotion: The band offered free downloads of the evening's performance via text.

LP has taken its fans on quite a ride. Starting with 2007's Minutes to Midnight, and kicking it up a notch on 2010's A Thousand Suns, LP have molded their cool, irked anthems into texturally epic concoctions in which moody electronic washes, cleaving pianos, and subtly contoured rhythms become part of the equation while carefully preserving the band's ire - Bennington's in particular. He embraced his inner MC (with torture as his lyrical métier, of course) through the galloping drums and swelling keyboards of "Blackout," and on the new "Waiting for the End," he and Shinoda paired up to sound like a couple of angels with dirty faces. The band gave out pulses that chugged like a train, plus an icily electronic vibe that would suit an Eno/U2 production. Bravo, gents.

Opening for Linkin Park was Pendulum. The UK metal-istes made their own brand of slick, tricky metal. They blend thudding, thundering drums with weirdly danceable beats, sludgy guitars, cheesy keyboard string synths, and manly, swoony crooning that by set's end came across like Megadeth meets New Order.