A Muse Retrospective - Part 2: Cross-Pollination

As most fans are probably aware, Muse are currently on tour performing Drones for the first time, and I recently got the chance to go see them, performing live at the SSE Hydro in Glasgow. I've previously
mentioned that Muse were the band that got me into music in the first place, and it was incredible to finally see them in the flesh after six years of loving their music. It was an amazing show, well worth the seven hour drive up to Scotland, and it’s left me in a very Muse-y mood recently.

So considering it’s long overdue, I thought now would be the perfect time to return to this retrospective, especially as seeing them live has really helped me to remember how great their songs are, even reinvigorating my love for some songs that I’d previously burned out on.

Following on from Absolution, their fourth album, Black Holes & Revelations, completes the super star trio along with Origin of Symmetry. Now I spoke out of turn in my last post, so I’d like to quickly rectify that. Absolution is not my favourite Muse album. I’m not sure what I was thinking exactly, Absolution is fantastic, but I don’t think it ever has in my mind, or ever will, top the sheer brilliance that is Black Holes & Revelations. Before we go any further, the cover.

Another Storm Thorgerson masterwork, and one that’s nearly as good as Absolution, although it doesn’t strike with the same kind of enigma as that did. The image depicts four burly men, dressed in the height of Martian fashion, sitting around a wooden table somewhere on the surface of Mars. It’s certainly a surrealist image, but it’s one I find quite amusing. Firstly, the burly men look incredibly confused, as if they’ve turned up for a job as a bouncer, and instead have been hustled around a table and told to “look photogenic”. Secondly, just thinking about the circumstances of the situation amuses me. Perhaps they’re from the Mars branch of Ikea and got lost trying to deliver some flat pack furniture. Maybe they got the wrong directions for their fashion support group. Maybe they’re the miniature unicorn appreciation society.

Anyway, onto the songs. BH&R has one of the most glorious (yes, that’s deliberate) track listings of any album, including several of my all-time favourite songs. The highlights are Assassin, an often overlooked blood-rush of guitar and drums, Knights of Cydonia, one of Muse’s greatest anthems (and an absolute spectacle when performed live, using the Man with the Harmonica theme from Once Upon a Time in the West as an intro) and Map of the Problematique, which is not only my favourite Muse song, but also one of my favourite songs, period. Seriously, if you haven’t had the honour of listening to it yet, please educate yourself; you will not regret it.

Other top tracks include the escalating opener Take a Bow, the emotionally charged Hoodoo, the Mexican ballad City of Delusion and the guitar-heavy Exo-Politics. Starlight and Supermassive Black Hole, while good songs, are a little tainted by the fact that they’re mainstream favourites, and end up being played all the time. Seeing Starlight live did help me re-appreciate it, but both still remain the most tired songs on the album. Which leaves Invincible and Soldier’s Poem. Invincible is a song I’ve never really gotten into until rather recently. It takes a little while to get going, but once it does, its climax puts it on the upper tier of the album. However, Soldier’s Poem is the unfortunate low point of the album. Revisiting it recently, it’s not a bad song, but I feel it breaks the flow of the album somewhat, and would have worked better as a B-side to Invincible. Interestingly, the best song to replace it with on the album would be Glorious: Invincible’s B-side. It’s a truly fantastic and emotional song, and tempo-wise, it’s the perfect bridge from the excitement of Map of the Problematique down to the slower and calmer beginning of Invincible. Switch Soldier’s Poem for Glorious, and you have a near perfect album.

So yeah, suffice to say, this is one of my favourite albums, not just of Muse’s catalogue, but of music in general. Only downside is its forty four minute runtime: the shortest of any Muse album to date, and while it means it doesn’t overstay its welcome, it also means the album’s over a little too quickly. Five stars, easily.

But for every peak, there’s a trough. Getting a bit of traction in the charts with numbers like Starlight and Supermassive Black Hole, Muse were beginning to seep into the mainstream. With the introduction of a new audience, Muse experimented a little with the next album, moving more towards a more symphonic and arty sound. The result was The Resistance. Now I’m not saying that they shouldn’t experiment but…..

This album cover is a difficult one for me to talk about because I’m not entirely sure what to think of it. Firstly, there’s a dude standing on what appears to be an orange version of the hard light bridge from Portal 2, with the Earth in the distance. Then there’s a load of hexagons. Coloured hexagons. I guess? I just don’t really know what to make of this cover. I find it a little visually exhausting, and I still don’t really get what it’s supposed to show or how it really relates to the album and its themes. Definitely not their best.

The Resistance was my first exposure to Muse, as my dad played the CD often in the car, to the point that when I got my first iPod, Uprising was the very first song I had and listened to on it, marking the start of my musical interests. So you’d think I’d have nostalgia for this album? Surprisingly, no. In fact, I’m still burned out on this album. It’s got less of the heavier stuff from earlier albums in favour of more symphonic and R&B tracks, and while these aren’t bad as such, there isn’t enough of the old good stuff to help balance it out. Uprising is the obvious best song: a synthrock anthem about government conspiracies that still holds up against their other classics. Unnatural Selection is probably the silent hero of the album, rarely talked about, but by far one of the strongest tracks on the album, and has a lovely progressive structure to it. Resistance, United States of Eurasia, MK Ultra and even the R&B Undisclosed Desires are all decent as well, while Guiding Light and I Belong to You bring up the rear. Closing the album is the thirteen minute Exogenesis Symphony, a series of three tracks that, truth be told, I'd never really listened to prior to writing these retrospectives, but now I have, these are definitely worth a look.

The first part, Overture, is a haunting and suspenseful build up that really makes your hair stand on end, conjuring images of falling down an infinite abyss. Part two, Cross-Pollination, has more of a focus on piano, with a slightly rockier section in the middle. I'd say it's about the same level as United States of Eurasia. The final part, Redemption, has echoes of Absolution, sounding like a calmer Ruled by Secrecy mixed with the lyricism of Fury. In total, it's certainly an interesting listen, but, like the rest of the album, never quite hits that peak. Overture is definitely the strongest of the three, and Cross-Pollination's middle section is reasonably enthralling, but otherwise, the symphony never quite gets the hang of that Pink Floyd formula of build-up, climax and progression that seems so key to these long progressive tracks.

Overall, it's not a particularly bad album, but it's certainly one of Muse's weaker efforts. There are certainly some highlights here, but unfortunately the peaks just aren't frequent or enough to counterbalance the 'meh' songs. I give it three stars.

Fast forward now to 2012. The Olympics are scheduled to take place in London, and as summer approaches, the hype is building. The planning committee need an official song for the Olympics, I guess as some kind of marketing thing. Who should step forward but Muse, to the delight of my fourteen year old self, presenting their newly written song, Survival, apparently about a murderer trying to track down and kill his family, but intriguingly that went over the heads of the committee, as it became the official track for the sporty festivities. And it was here that Muse finally broke through the barrier of the mainstream into the common public consciousness of modern music. At the time, it was great; finally I could ask someone if they'd heard of Muse, and instead of hearing "No.", I now got to hear (and still do) "Yeah, I liked the one about the black hole."

Anyway, as Muse were now mainstream, their new album (which released the same year) needed to be a little more 'hip with kids', and what should be popular at the time but the cancerous garble of audio that was dubstep. Guess what, guys? It's time for The 2nd Law, the album where Muse went dubstep on us.

Before I continue with my rant, let's quickly go over the cover. It's pretty good; good enough to hang as a poster on my wall. It depicts.....something. I think I read somewhere that it's an imaging of a human neuron network, which is pretty neat. Regardless, it's full of colour, striking, memorable, and iconic, if a little hard to draw in your textbooks.

Now, as I sort of hinted at back there, I'm not a fan of dubstep (and that is somewhat of an understatement), and unfortunately, in Muse's continuing attempts to experiment, they decided to dip their toes in the liquid shit of the mainstream trend of making people's ears vomit. There is, however, some good on the album. Supremacy and Survival are a refreshing breath of fresh air after The Resistance; a return to the heavy rock sound and exhilarating guitar of before, with the newer sheen and polish of modern alternate rock. The former sounds very much like a modern Bond song, possibly intended to be the theme to Skyfall, which also released that year. Survival, while initially not being quite my cup of tea, has really grown on me, becoming, in my opinion anyway, one of their strongest songs. I urge anyone who hasn't to give it a listen, especially to the Queen-inspired build-up of the beginning and the blistering guitar climaxes towards the end. Panic Station is also fantastic, managing the difficult task of being both a catchy pop song that could get played at parties, while still being, you know, a good song: a direction that they unfortunately didn't really take later on in the album. Liquid State is also a good listen, rarely talked about, as it lurks near the end of the album, but a surprisingly cool song, written and sung by bassist Chris Wolstenholme, in an intriguing subversion of the established routine. Animals and Big Freeze are also decent, and while not really as memorable as some of Muse's other songs, they still qualify as some of the best on the album, primarily because the rest of the album is stuff like Madness.

Oh, Madness, why do people like you? A surprisingly popular track, even being played up at Glasgow, I've never really understood what people see in it. At best, it's a dull attempt at a mainstream sound that never really does anything interesting enough to give it merit: it was the only point of the entire live performance that bored me. There's also Follow Me, a track that has a reasonable start and build up for the first minute or so and then, as it's getting good, "surprise dubstep!" and the quality suddenly dips. Save Me and Explorers are rather forgettable, and that leads us to the turd hanging awkwardly to the end of the album, The 2nd Law.

Unsustainable actually has a pretty promising start, with some reasonably epic string build up, and even the glitching news report isn't bad. But then there's, you guessed it, dubstep. And it suddenly sounds like shit. To my dismay, there is actually some cool guitar work and rock music smothered into the background, which could have made for a much more interesting rock track. But no. Isolated System, interestingly, is much better. No dubstep, and instead a nice little instrumental piece, but it's not very good as a song. It feels like someone took the intro and outro from a much longer, better prog rock track and then spliced them together. Definitely not as painful as Unsustainable, but a disappointing way to end a disappointing album. Is this Muse's worst? Debatable. The Resistance is consistently dull, but The 2nd Law jumps between really fucking good and really obnoxious, so they probably average to the same area. I'd say The 2nd Law is the better album, just because the songs which are good outshine The Resistance's track listing by a mile. This album probably averages to three stars.

Fuck me, that was much longer than I expected. If you've stuck around this long, thanks for sifting through this ream of text, and sorry it's taken this long to get out (I actually redrafted this post from scratch after the initial, which contributed to the delay). The third and final part will go live on the 8th June, the one year anniversary of Drones, which will also be the topic, so stick around for that. In the meantime, thank you for reading, and go enjoy some Muse!

EDIT: I have since found out through idle research that the guys on the front cover of Black Holes & Revelations are supposed to be the four horsemen of the apocalypse. Sooo, no miniature unicorn appreciation society?