Paul Smith – The Corsair
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 puerile and inane.
And so it is with The Resistance, the new album by Muse—a big loud stadium-rock opera brimming with romantic tales of defying Big Brother as the Judgment Day horn blares… that just sounds so bombastically 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.
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 this change may be disappointing to some, moments 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 the album and for what’s to come next: the title track, “Resistance,” a rocking strident plea to fight against the archetypal and ubiquitous Evil Empire.
The album then takes a bit of a turn with the song “Undisclosed Desires;” a track with a kitschy 80’s-throwback ambience which sounds like early Depeche Mode or maybe Tears for Fears.
But what follows is when the flood gates of craziness truly burst open with the totally frenzied madcap opus, “United States of Eurasia.” This track features more than a slight nod to Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” thrown in with a bit of the main theme to Lawrence of Arabia along with homage paid to the work of composers Camille Saint-Saëns and Frédéric Chopin.
The album closes with a three-part symphonic epic called “Exogenesis” which mixes the orchestral compositions of Chopin, Wagner, and Gershwin with the rock-opera sensibilities of Queen, Rush and Electric Light Orchestra. This segment of the album harkens back somewhat to their prog days, but here just feels a bit overly polished and overindulgent—like a psychedelic orchestral score made for an avant-garde Jerry Bruckheimer film.
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 presumably in the form of a paranoid love poem penned as an elegy 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.
Granted, once the album’s singles begin their inevitable rotation on the airwaves, they will probably be among the best things currently playing on MTV or corporate radio, but that bar has obviously been set incredibly low.
While 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 adolescent 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: C+