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New Release: Muse “2nd Law”
When Muse first appeared as a major musical act over a decade ago, there were a lot of Radiohead comparisons flying around. Twelve years and six albums later, that comparison now seems totally odd if not downright laughable. As Radiohead has gotten more experimental–playing around with atonality, noise, and disjointed sounds–Muse has become more melodic, more baroque, and more romantic, executing music in grand, melodramatic gestures. It’s the musical equivalent of the kind of bravado one associates with heroes in Tennyson poems or Andrew Lloyd Weber musicals who refuse the blindfold before they are shot by the firing squad. Never again will Muse suffer the inequity of being falsely compared to Radiohead, for if Radiohead were a classical piece of music they’d most certainly be Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. Whereas if Muse were a classical piece of music they’d be a Verdi opera elaborately staged.
And no where is that distinction now more clear than on Muse’s new album, 2nd Law, which takes the grand, rock opera extravagance of Queen’s “Boheminan Rhapsody” and spreads it out across an entire album. There’s a story in this album, a novel of lost love and oppressive regimes that, like an opera, executes its tale in the deep, stomach clenching emotionalism of crescendo-ing choruses and agonizing arias. What the plot of this tale is, precisely, I haven’t decided yet. But it is there, no doubt.
In case you may not be certain, based on the preceeding paragraphs, this album takes what we’ve come to associate with Muse’s music to the next level. That slow build of anxiety about love, governments, some unnameable “they” that rises up through the verses and blasts out of the choruses has now taken on a life of its own. That sense of theatricality that has always been there is, finally, a thing unto itself. Regard the song “Panic Station” which is clearly an homage to Michael Jackson’s ”Thriller.” Or take the song “Survival” which functions like a chorus closing the first act of one of the more bizarre productions I’ve ever witnessed. It is a defiant, blistering, pyrotechnic sound exploding your senses, complete with a guitar solo right out of Judas Priest’s more post-apocalyptic moments.
Speaking of the post-apocalyptic, what do you make of a line like this, “all the land is owned/And none of it left for you or me”? One can almost picture the neo-Gothic flavor a stage version of this album would inevitably produce. Something with all the flourishes of Phantom of the Opera or Les Miserables but painted liberally with Repo! The Genetic Opera and just a tinge of Mad Max.
None of this is to say that this album is bad. It is pure pleasure to listen to. So if you are in the mood to feel like you’ve never felt before, to hear with your entie body; if need to belt out a song at the top of your lungs, employing manic hand gestures that convey all the deepest parts of your psyche . . . well, then this album is for you. Pardon me, I need to go sing on a balcony.