Pearson Jones
Assistant Style Editor
Muse’s musical intuition has been distorted since its triumphant, mainstream success with their album Black Holes and Revelations, which launched the British trio across the pond and onto the radio wavelengths and music scene of the States.
Muse’s newest album, The Resistance shamelessly borrows musical creativity from Queen and Radiohead, a catalyst for lead man Matthew Bellamy to compose his passion-project rock opera album he apparently has been planning to do for a while now. Not many bands have the gumption or musical perception to compose a 15 minute-long three-piece rock symphony—something that supposedly took Bellamy 10 years to write—complete with an overture-to-outro on an album already crammed to the brink with unfamiliar sounds and difficult music that listeners will need a couple of go-arounds to comprehend.
The Resistance introduces itself with the albums weak single “Uprising,” a minimalistic beat-driven song that’s so unmemorable you’ll forget about it as quickly as it probably took Bellamy to write the uninspiring, anti-conformity lyrics. “They will not force us/They will stop degrading us/They will not control us/We will be victorious” is sung by Bellamy in a quickly spoken style. Bellamy’s lyrics are so cliché they end up losing the flare he had intended them to have, coming off as nothing more than a message a 9/11 conspiracy theory PSA would have in it. The lyrics come close to conceiving the idea that we all live in a world the Wachowski brothers created. Bellamy’s lyrics are over dramatic in every sense of the word, with a theme bands like Green Day and Rage Against the Machine killed and buried a long time ago.
The track “United States of Eurasia” was also released early with the “Uprising” single and is one of the many tracks that justify accusations to Bellamy’s recently developed Queen fetish. Queen has “Bohemian Rhapsody,” Muse has “United States of Eurasia” it’s that obvious and simple. The mock Queen ballad follows the same climatic structure with all band members singing in sporadic moments and guitar riffs that resonate the power of Brian May. You’ll get images of Wayne and Garth lip-synching down the strip of Detroit in the Gremlin while listening to it.
“I Belong to You” and “Unnatural Selection” are shining moments for The Resistance. “I Belong to You” is completely absent of Bellamy’s guitar, substituting in piano for the entire song. The track is interrupted midway with Bellamy’s softly spoken lyrics and just him on piano, which is then escalated into him blaring out French lyrics that will remind you of The Beatles’ “Michelle.”
“Unnatural Selection” almost stays closer to what Muse was like on Origin of Symmetry. The track begins with an eerie haunted house organ, followed by a riff that sounds sampled from Muse’s “New Born.” Both flawlessly capture what Muse used to be, containing merciless guitar riffs that you would break your neck jamming out to.
Personally, I don’t think the guys in Muse really know what they’re going for anymore.
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