A dubstep-inflected, cinematic symphony hybrid with a chopped-up spoken monologue that takes the second law of thermodynamics as its inspiration?
Must be a new Muse album in town…
The UK power trio’s brand new studio album, The 2nd Law has been officially released in Australia, and as it turns out, the whole ‘Muse go Skrillex’ controversy of the record’s album teaser – and what eventually became penultimate album track ‘Unsustainable’ – is a handy prism to view Muse’s sixth studio album.
A record that is, song-for-song, as sonically daring as anything the band have attempted yet – outstripping many of the band’s ‘everything and the kitchen sink’ moments. Including the proto-‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ of ‘Knights of Cydonia’, the outlandish ‘United States of Eurasia’ and, yes, even the French-singing, opera-referencing, bass clarinet-soloing of ‘I Belong To You’ (That’s ‘Mon Cœur S’ouvre À Ta Voix’ to you Francophiles).
If the London 2012 Olympics anthem ‘Survival’ irked some, there’s plenty more here that if it doesn’t polarise fans, will certainly be the final straw that breaks the back of those hoping Muse would steer back from the waters of genre diversity to pen that 23-minute magnum opus epic they’d always hinted at.
Bad luck, they’re simply having too much fun.
Forget the dubstep and OTT Olympics anthem, ‘Panic Station’ is easily the most willingly bonkers moment here, channeling Kick-era INXS and Bowie’s 80s decadence. While ‘Big Freeze’ is an unashamedly buffed and polished pop/rock ballad – complete with U2’s Edge-scaling guitars – that makes the band’s previous glossy highpoint, ‘Starlight’ seem gritty.
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But to understand just how Pendulum-tinged ballads (‘Follow Me’) or dripping, twinkling odes to terra forma (‘Explorers’) can be seen as daring as opposed to pure folly, we have to understand the extremes the band have previously charted.
Or more importantly, the initial promise of where Muse came from, where they were going, and where they ended up.
While their early days showed a band that took the excesses of progressive rock and heavy metal and curtly introduced them to a baroque sense of melody and classical formality. The years since have seen Muse edging ever closer to a more widely accepted form of sonic showmanship.
Not mainstream in the traditional sense, but enough to fill the world’s largest stadia and charts several times over with some of the barmiest moments in modern rock.
Their winding towards a generally accepted sense of grand pomp eventually brought on endless (but not unfair) comparisons to Queen, thoroughly replacing the Radiohead associations that used to dog them. (A fact that probably bothered Thom Yorke more than it did the Teignmouth trio.)
But while their edginess and outsider status originally had left-field music lovers shambling from the fringes to see what all the fuss and noise was about, many more of the same converted abandoned Muse when it seemed they had made the arena rock spectacular their residing habitat rather than a by-product of their ambitions.
If you were forced to pinpoint the moment, it may well be the cross-over success of 2006’s Black Holes & Revelations, which first proved that beating beneath the sci-fi affectations and symphonic grandeur was a heart of sheer pop ambition.
And so we come to The 2nd Law, which forgivingly, opens with ‘Supremacy’, the kind of fusion of rock riffage-meets-string section that’s become their trademark; only to close, thirteen tracks later, with a cyclic instrumental of haunting electronica reminiscent more of Mike Oldfield’s grandiose Tubular Bells than the Rage Against The Machine-meets-Rachmaninov (with a touch of Bond theme) of the album’s opening.
Much like The Resistance before it, Muse have again ditched an overall sonic consistency for a track-by-track attitude production technique, a listen which can prove to be exhausting work.
As they expand their creative boundaries, and task the listener with making ever greater stylistic leaps between them, what was once genre-hopping can now feel like genre-leaps-of-faith.
Rocketing from shimmering mood-setting to buzzing bass-driven rumble to Hans Zimmer-aping film score like so many planets in a breathless trip of the band’s musical universe. To follow Muse’s sci-fi fascination to its logical conclusion, when you land on that new musical world for the first time, it’s a bit scary and uncharted – hell, you don’t even know if there’s life.
Luckily, there’s some comfortable familiarity in Matthew Bellamy’s lyrical moors remaining relatively unchanged.
Aside from the counting silliness of ‘Panic Station’, there’s the usual invisible oppressor (‘wake to see/your true emancipation is a fantasy’ he sings on ‘Supremacy’), along with a host of sweeping, unifying statements of ‘us’ versus the derisions of an uncertain ‘them’ played out against the drama of geo-political conspiracy and apocalyptic angst.
They’re all just rejigged forms of Bellamy’s previous expressions, this time the fat cats of ‘Uprising’ are literally ‘Animals’, all the while Bellamy urging – most bluntly on ‘Survival’ – the same defiant tones that characterised ‘Butterflies & Hurricanes’ nearly a decade ago. Its refrain of ‘best/you’ve got to be the best/you’ve got to change the world” now a simple chant of ‘Fight! Fight! Fight!/Win! Win! Win!’
When they’re not fighting and winning, love is Muse’s other thematic preoccupation on The 2nd Law.
Not even Bellamy’s split from his long-term model girlfriend Gaia Polloni could sour the romantic idealist that blossomed on The Resistance. In fact the mid-section of the record is given almost entirely to unapologetically syrupy ballads.
Muse’s towering neon inferno version of them, but ballads all the same.
We can now add ‘Madness’, ‘Follow Me’, and especially ‘Explorers’ to the band’s ‘widescreen heart-on-sleeve’ catalogue that already includes ‘Starlight’, ‘Resistance’ and ‘Guiding Light’.
As has become Muse tradition, from Absolution’s ‘Butterflies & Hurricanes’ to Black Holes & Revelations’ mariachi trumpet-aided ‘City of Delusion’ and, of course, the three-part Exogenesis symphony – Muse have always saved their more daring moments tucked at the back-end of their records.
The 2nd Law is no different, and in true theatrical style it contains what is perhaps the band’s most shocking ‘third act reveal’ yet.
Namely, bassist Chris Wolstenholme taking the lead vocal duties on ‘Save Me’ and ‘Liquid State’, and under his command, Muse sound like curious doppelgangers of themselves.
Shorn of Bellamy’s distinctive, curtain-shredding falsetto, and with his virtuoso playing stripped back, the focus is on building layers and rhythmic pulses that make them sound like a pocket-sized Dream Theater. (More so for the fact that ‘Save Me’ deals with Wolstenholme’s alcohol addiction, just as Dream Theater’s Mike Portnoy did for his own ‘Twelve Step Suite’.)
They really do sound like the prog-metal also-rans Muse were never content on being, rather than sounding regressive, it’s a fascinating glimpse into an alternate reality version of the band.
It’s a fascinating step for the trio, who have always looked at the supposedly static boundaries more as playful permutations, asking ‘why?’ – then having turned that gaze to their own configuration and similarly asked ‘why not!?’
As for the other musically eclectic moments of the album, it’s not inconceivable for the likes of ‘Madness’, with its throbbing electropop, or ‘Animals’ curious mix of buzzing harpsichord, keys and guitar noodling – to inspire whole sub-genres of imitators. If any had the enough skill and sheer gall to pull it off that is.
But one question remains hovering in the periphery with each of Muse’s sweeping stylistic changes across The 2nd Law – how big and extravagant can they get before there’s no where to go but down?
Many will see the record’s eclectic mix of surging pop drama, dubstep-threaded neo-rock and sheer moments of bombast as the handy excuse to finally ditch the group; dismissing them in an act of vindication for holding out against them from their sci-fi grunge days of Origin Of Symmetry.
That they’re simply stuck in a treadmill of rewriting the same song over and over and trussing it up in new emperor’s clothes. Name-checking the dubstep and OTT Olympics anthem to confirm what many long suspected, that Muse had long disappeared up their own backside. That they’ve succumbed to the worst aspects of their self-indulgence.
While that criticism works sporadically, it is not the brush by which you can tar The 2nd Law in its entirety; because to do so is to forget the band’s inherent sense of humour.
Whether it’s hamming it up at the expense of mimed television performances, or Bellamy’s accounts of recording ‘United States of Eurasia’ and cracking up after doing another face-melting guitar take. Then calling the track “hilarious” in the press, saying of its exaggerated megalomania “it just makes me laugh every time, because it’s so outrageous.”
Muse are well aware of their total excess, with tongue firmly planted in cheek with every extravagant musical gesture – they just don’t care.
Or as the lyrics to the truly daft ‘Panic Station’ puts it: ‘Stand up and deliver/your wildest fantasy/Do what the fuck you want to/there’s no-one to repeat.’
Bonkers they may well be, but the biggest criticism levelled at the band is ironically their greatest strength. Their musical abrasiveness – mixing high and low culture, popular and unpopular sounds, genuine virtuosity with false authenticity – are merely tools to achieving their end goals.
To Muse, musical elements and styles are all just colours to help pretty up their mad musical rainbow, like so many hues in a pack of crayons, using them to scrawl well outside the lines. Love or loathe their methods – but without them, the music landscape would be a far duller shade of grey.
That space-age cover image of a brain scan may be a far more obvious metaphor than it first appears. An explosion of multi-coloured music that’s deceptively intelligent, playful and more than a little insane – the scooped, noodled remains of whoever’s cranium has just been exploded by Muse’s latest set of madcap adventures.
Madness? This. Is. Muse!
