Alternate title: I'm Sorry Muse, but We're Just Looking for Different Things...
Evening all.
I shall start this post by explaining what Muse mean to me.
They were one of my first loves. After The Who, they were one of the first bands I got properly obsessive over. I listened to their albums all the way through more times than I can remember, I would peruse MuseWiki for hours, looking up obscure facts about the production of their albums (did you know, for example, that the percussion on Screenager involves llama bones and toenails?). I was one of the new influx of fans who came during the Black Holes and Revelations era, but wasted no time getting to grips with their older material, and waited in breathless anticipation for their next release, The Resistance (which is a whole other post in itself). One of the first things I did to test my compatibility with my current partner was to play her Absolution in its entirety (I'm just an old romantic I guess...). I watched their live DVD HAARP like other people watch their favourite movie. I have a list of my favourite Muse b-sides.
In other words I am an out-and-out Muse fan.
But something troubling has been happening in my relationship with the band. I feel like we're drifting apart. Like a couple where the fire has gone out, Muse and I just don't click in the way we used to.
It started with The Resistance. Now I am not a detractor from that album. It's good, there are many good tracks there, not least the fine examples of MK Ultra and United States of Eurasia. But that's it, it's just good. Not amazing, not mind-blowing, just decent. None of my top five favourite Muse tracks are from that album. I liked it, and I happily bought it, but I felt like it was an album from a band who were beginning to lose their touch. I mean come on, Undisclosed Desires? Really guys? With an unfocused track like I Belong to You and the slightly underwhelming Guiding Light and title track, it felt like the start of a downhill climb.
But I am nothing if not a loyal fan, and my optimism held out. I was prepared to accept it as a minor blip, with a view to a refreshed Muse for their next release. Even the slightly wobbly Neutron Star Collision couldn't quite diminish my hope.
But now...
Now I feel like it may be time for Muse and I to see other bands.
Listen to this track, Muse's official release for the Olympics:
It's just...
Just... weird.
Don't get me wrong, I can do weird. I love Micro Cuts - and damn that's a weird track - but there's weird and there's weird.
The song just doesn't work for me. It's just a mess. Each section of the track is pretty decent in itself and would make a great backbone to a Muse song; the bombast, the epic scope and paranoia are all in place. But all mixed in together, the result is unimpressive. Clearly a lot of work has gone into the composition, but it's incoherent as a song. The string section at the beginning is nice, but instead of being developed, it just disappears to make way for that strange chanting bit, which again is ok, but never goes anywhere, being quickly replaced by a guitar solo coming out of nowhere, which again is good, but doesn't mesh. The solo, over seemingly random bursts of choir singing, finally makes way for, admittedly, a pretty awesome riff, but it still seems out of place, like someone changed track mid-song.
The main problem with this track is that I want to hear more of each section, preferably in separate songs. It's like someone's inexpertly mixed together a bunch of Muse tracks from across their career, without putting any thought into how they'd sound next to each other.
And then there's Matt Bellamy's vocals. As with the rest of the song, they are good. He sings well, he always does. But they just don't sound right. For some reason he's decided to go for a deeper tone in his voice, which wouldn't be a bad thing, if the rest of the song wasn't so bombastic. What a track with that huge a sound needs is Bellamy's signature falsetto shriek, not this relatively restrained low tenor.
The most galling thing of all for me is that this song represents my worst fears about where Muse have been going over the last couple of years. It seems there will really never be another Absolution or Black Holes. The golden age is over and like so many aging bands before them, Muse are descending into releasing increasingly average songs. The raw energy of Origin of Symmetry doesn't seem to be there any more, and we're left just with the ridiculousness, which is fun, but it's not brilliant.
If there's any positive to be gleaned from this release it is that making a song for such a mainstream event as the London Olympics will get more people interested in the music of Muse, and the many more amazing tracks they have to offer. Though when a band like them have been featured on the cover of NME more times than I've had hot dinners it's hard to imagine how much more mainstream success they could have.
I still sincerely hope that Muse will have a return to form at some stage, but unlike before, it's more a vain wish than an earnest expectation.
Happy guitar noodling and when the apocalypse comes, let us hope that it is something biblical.
Gabe
No comments:
Post a Comment