Album Reviews

This hard /progrock trio never got the media hype and they are rarely mentioned outside their own musical world, but Muse has made it big. How? The old fashioned way: hard work in the studio and constant touring. They have an intensely loyal fan base. Their worldwide touring grosses are impressive and they chart  well around the world

The sound is nothing new or particularly unique—kind of U2 meets Queen meets Live, shakes hands with Radiohead, performing earnest, anthemic apocalyptic songs. The tone is dramatic and almost desperate.

This hard /progrock trio never got the media hype and they are rarely mentioned outside their own musical world, but Muse has made it big. How? The old fashioned way: hard work in the studio and constant touring. They have an intensely loyal fan base. Their worldwide touring grosses are impressive and they chart  well around the world

The sound is nothing new or particularly unique—kind of U2 meets Queen meets Live, shakes hands with Radiohead, performing earnest, anthemic apocalyptic songs. The tone is dramatic and almost desperate.

The titles here include: “Apocalypse Please,” “Time is Running Out,” and “Sing For Absolution.” And that’s just side one!

Lead singer and guitarist Matthew Bellamy’s mood is unrelentingly tense as he belts out the lyrics in long gliding lines that hold on the last word of a phrase with a dramatic, almost operatic vibrato that shifts instantly and effortlesslyh into falsetto and then back. You’ll hear the connection to Bono, to Thom Yorke, to Ed Kowalczyk and distantly to Freddie Mercury.

The backdrop is blistering and unrelenting, driven by Dominic Howard’s propulsive drumming that may remind you of Lars Ulrich as the overdriven on the beat guitar sound will have you thinking James Hetfield. There are no blues influences to be heard. This is as whiteas rock music gets—not that there’s anything wrong with that!

Yet despite the obvious influences, Muse has crafted a unique, hard driving, if a bit overblown and grandiose sound. While Bellamy’s bag of vocal and musical tricks is at this point somewhat limited, though in the midst of “ Butterflies & Hurricanes” the boys break out into a Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 1-like interlude, so who knows where they’ll be headed in the future. 

They played Saturday Night Live last season and the performance was disappointing. These guys are genuine worldwide superstars. Yet they didn’t inhabit the stage fully and seemed to lack the charisma and stage presence you’d expert from what I imagine is a constantly touring band. But then they were probably out of their element too, which I would imagine is an audience of sweaty raging hormone, adolescent boys and the adjacent generation of young adults that can still relate.

You’re probably no longer in either category but you might enjoy the urgent ride anyway, and think back to a time when this message might have weighed heavily on your soul (not to mention your libido) and what that felt like. For oldsters its empowering, let me tell you—like how former cokesters feel when they see lines on a mirror in a movie.

Someone at Warner Brothers felt this group would do well on vinyl and so has issued their entire catalog on double vinyl, including Showbiztheir 1999 debut, this one, which is their third album from 2003 (UK)/2004 (US), 2006’s Black Holes and Revelationsand 2009’s The Resistance.

The recording quality is pretty good for modern hard rock. Producer/engineer Rich Costey has a good ear for layering the well recorded individual elements to produce solid, three dimensional images, though the recording has been compressed so it ‘rocks out’ hard. It works for this kind of music though I bet a more dynamic edition would sound even better.

Great car and iPod stuff, but on double vinyl it works well at home too!