Muse – The Resistance (Warner Bros/ Helium-3)
Everyone enjoys a good conspiracy theory – a wild romp through fanciful images of shadow and light at war behind the scenes of ordinary life. But once you peel back the layers and do some proper research, those tales of secret brotherhoods, aliens and government cover-ups just seem so silly and childish.
And so it is with The Resistance, the new album by Muse that leaked this week (available below) – a big loud stadium-rock opera filled with romantic tales of defying Big Brother set against the backdrop of Judgment Day… that ultimately just feels so hollow.
Muse’s front-man Matt Bellamy has never had any qualms about admitting he is a conspiracy theorist, and on this outing (their fifth studio album), his penchant for the sinister and bizarre is once again on full display.
Those who have never heard Muse will probably notice Bellamy has a falsetto vocal range reminiscent of Thom Yorke from Radiohead, and in many ways, Muse sounds like a louder, poppier, eviler Radiohead (though Radiohead is clearly the better band).
The band has moved slowly away from the prog-rock experimentation on their early albums toward a much more radio-friendly big arena-rock sound. And while that change is disappointing, some of the new stuff is certainly fun.
The album opener “Uprising” is a simple, thunderous catchy number destined to be a single, and lyrically, it also sets the tone for what’s to come next: the title track “Resistance,” a rocking strident plea to resist the powers-that-be with love.
The album then takes a bit of a turn with the song “Undisclosed Desires;” a track with an 80’s throwback ambience, which, strangely enough, sounds like early Depeche Mode or maybe Tears for Fears for a new era.
But what follows is when the flood gates of craziness truly burst open with the totally frenzied madcap opus (and perhaps the best song on the album), “United States of Eurasia.” This track features more than a slight nod to Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” with a bit of the main theme to Lawrence of Arabia thrown in the mix. Also featured in the instrumentation is an homage to the work of composers Camille Saint-Saëns and Frédéric Chopin.
The album closes with a three-part symphonic epic called “Exogenesis” that mixes the orchestral compositions of Chopin, Wagner, and Gershwin with the rock-opera sensibilities of Queen, Rush and Electric Light Orchestra, and it all comes together in an interesting, albeit a bit overreaching and flawed, musical arrangement that somehow sounds modern.
There is no question that much of this album is enjoyable and plays well at the higher decibels.
But ultimately, the album just doesn’t gel as a whole very well, partly due to the embarrassingly awful lyrics. Bellamy has attempted to create some sort of concept album which feels a bit like a paranoid love poem penned as a soundtrack for the Apocalypse. Yet, the end product sounds more like the ramblings of a teenage pot-head that has read too many David Icke books and has fallen in love for the first time.
It seems like Muse was really swinging for the fences on this new album, but the result is more of an inside-the-park homerun than a grand-slam. Granted, once it begins its inevitable rotation on the airwaves, it will probably be one of the best things currently playing on MTV or corporate radio, but that bar has obviously been set incredibly low.
One must give Muse props for attempting something grandiose, but for all its ambition, much of it still sounds like boilerplate arena-rock fit for the radio dials, and the thematic and lyrical content is unforgivably juvenile.
Perhaps Bellamy will someday grow up and abandon his puerile obsession with conspiracies and other such nonsense, but until then, he will always come off as a pseudo-intellectual. And as such, this review shall close with an oft-quoted Shakespearean line, a favorite for the pseudo-intellectual in all of us: The Resistance “is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
Grade: B-
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