MUSE HISTORY

English trio Muse (vocalist and guitarist Matthew Bellamy, bassist Chris Wolstenholme, drummer Dominic Howard) debuted very young. Following the EPs Muse (Dangerous, 1997) and Muscle Museum (1998), the first full-length album, Showbiz (Maverick, 1999), sounded at time like a parody and at time like an improvement over Radiohead's original sound. The "shoegazing" guitar tremoloes ofSunburn and Uno were the highlights, whereas the majestic Cave and Muscle Museumcontinued the Brit-pop saga from an oblique perspective and the singer indulged in a couple of classy plaintive ballads (Unintended,Falling Down). The band focuses on teenage angst, but neither the lyrics not the music are particularly effective at rendering their philosophy.
Bellamy emphasizes the two most personal elements of his music on Origin of Symmetry(Mushroom , 2001): the guitar noise (feedback, fuzz, droning) and his hyper-emotional, quasi-operatic singing. Add the piano, that is rapidly becoming his favorite instrument, and the result is a curious blend of post-grunge cliches (best summarized inCitizen Erased) and timbric hallucination (Hyper Music). There are cool ideas in Plug in Baby, New Born, Space Dementia,Darkshines, but they tend to repeat themselves to death, and one suspects the (limited) technical skills of the trio are to blame for it.
Absolution (Warner, 2003) graduated their falsetto-driven progressive hard-rock to new artistic heights. Having better modulated the combination of hard and soft moments, and steered clear of the bombastic Queen sound, they penned a sequence of mini-dramas staged around an apocalyptic message. Apocalypse Please is emblematic of the instrumental maturity: it is driven not so much by the operatic vocals as by the military tempo that mutates into intense drumming. The mood is geometrically enhanced by the central break, a duet between the synthesizer and wordless vocals, and the thundering piano notes that bookend it at the beginning and the end. Matthew Bellamy's vocal skills are best displayed in the atmospheric ballad Sing For Absolution, whose crescendos are of a psalm-like intensity, in the funereal lullaby Blackout, an agonizing whisper amid wavering strings, and in the moribund closer Ruled By Secrecy, as close to a monastery prayer as a rock band can get. However, the peak of pathos may occur in the few pieces that lean towards hard-rock: Time Is Running Out, a plaintive melody fueled by burning riffs, Hysteria (a virulent showcase of Chris Wolstenholme's virtuoso bass), Stockholm Syndrome, Thoughts of a Dying Atheist.
Black Holes and Revelations (2006) added baroque pop arrangements, i.e. a bit of Verve, to their original musical synthesis (Supermassive Black Hole).
The Resistance (Warner, 2009) is a mixed blessing. The first three songs are charming unpretentious ditties: Uprising boasts the driving burning sinister boogie rhythm of T.Rex;Resistance (probably the album's highglight) starts out with ghostly electronics, tribal drums and carillon piano, but then explodes with a soaring Brit-pop refrain; and Undisclosed Desires is a synth-pop ballad a` la Depeche Mode. Then United States Of Eurasia picks up steam with Queen-style bombast, I Belongmutates from a clownish music-hall tempo to a martial melodrama, and the hymn-like Guiding Light is an ominous reminder of the group's un bridled ambition. The three-movementExogenesis features a ponderous orchestral overture, a David Bowie-esque apotheosis and a confused chamber adagio.