A Word on Muse's "The Resistance"

Most of the reviews for Muse's newest album are pretty bad...mixed in some parts, but mostly very derogatory. Many focus on how much they steal, from sources as wide as Chopin, Queen, Jeff Buckley, Thom Yorke, etc. Many focus on how goddamn ridiculous it is for 3 white kids from Devon to be wailing about social unrest and rebellion. Many focus on the degree to which you need to have your head up your ass to write a "symphony" called, of all things, Exogenesis.

There is a new song in three parts, more of a symphony than a song, which I have been working on sporadically for many years [...] As a large percentage of the composition is orchestral, I have never wanted to collaborate with a string arranger as they may make it 'theirs'. So I have been arranging the orchestral elements myself, which is taking a long time. It should hopefully make the next album as the final three tracks.

For one thing, a symphony has such a nobler history, and much more rigidity than they dare to touch (most symphonies use Sonata form). Calling it orchestral is bullshit, as it's just the normal ensemble plus a few strings putting up a melody line. Continuing:

["Exogenesis: Symphony"] is influenced by Rachmaninov, Richard Strauss, Chopin and Pink Floyd. It looks at the concept of 'panspermia'. It is a story of humanity coming to an end and everyone pinning their hopes on a group of astronauts who go out to explore space and spread humanity to another planet. Part 1 is a jaded acceptance that civilization will end. Part 2 is a desperate hope that sending the astronauts to find and populate other planets will be successful alongside the recognition that this is the last hope. Finally, Part 3 is when the astronauts realise that it is just one big cycle, and recognise that unless humanity can change it it will happen all over again

That's a pretty strong list of influences, and I can't say I hear anything besides Chopin in it. The thematic underpinnings that they talk about are, themselves, pretty ridiculous, and starting part 3 with a broken major chord in second inversion played over and over and over and over does not imply cyclicality. I could get deeper and deeper into the way that their approach irritates me, but let's just say that I don't feel that any of them are musical geniuses, or geniuses at all.

But y'know what? I love this album. I love it with all my heart.

I listen to Muse because of what they feel, not what they say or what they intend to mean. The whole damn album is suffused with their energy, taking all sorts of different forms; the hopping 12/8 of Uprising, the dystopic yet hopeful soaring of Resistance, the detached percussion (I had trouble wording this) of Undisclosed desires, the holy shit I am absolutely fucking soaring United States of Eurasia, etc. etc.

Two words on Eurasia: holy shit. For some reason, this piece just pushes my classically-trained buttons in the best possible way. The quiet piano, and very subtle increasing of complexity and crescendo leading to the first guitar chords like some sort of sound orgasm. Those chords in the beginning reference the chorus part, where the chromatic lines ascends and receds over a conserved baseline before the whole thing shifts into unison Eastern scales. That's brilliant, right there, that's balence. The second verse only does that more, using diffent chords and overpinnings to give the same sense of balence and slight modulation, and then creating total balence with all sorts of modulation in the chorus. The swirling drum riffs, rising piano chords, and string lines all pivot about that held bass note, giving this huge sense of reaching and achieving, and then....Eur-aaaaayyyyy-SIA! SIA! SIA SIA! It's Muse's bombast at its best, and in my mind, it's surprisingly artful.

A lot of the songs are like this. Exogenesis deserves a blog for itself and I'm not going to get into it, but it does have some classical integrity as well as that beautiful, compelling, totally self-absorbed bombast. It's an epic, really. The whole album is epic and scope, and for these guys to do that while being 3 white guys from Devon takes a certain amount of stupidity, and a certain amount of skill. I think it's possible to appreciate the album while reconciling both.