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From The Sunday Times<br/>
From The Sunday Times<br/>
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== See also ==
== See also ==
* [http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/music/article6802083.ece This article on Times Online]
* [http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/music/article6802083.ece This article on Times Online]
* {{ML |40096 | Muselive thread | type=normal}}
* {{MLth |40096}}


{{backto | The Times}}
{{backto | The Times}}


[[Category:The Resistance reviews]]
[[Category:The Resistance reviews]]
[[Category:Scan missing]]

Latest revision as of 14:33, 3 May 2011

To cite this source, include <ref>{{cite/Times Online 2009-08-23}}</ref>

From The Sunday Times
August 23, 2009

Muse return with new album The Resistance

Devon rockers' CD follow-up to Black Holes and Revelations has hints of Queen, Berlioz, Chopin and Lizst, glam-rock and R&B

Times Online 2009-08-23.jpg

When they were teenagers, the three members of Muse would sometimes fantasise about playing a gig at the Den, a lawned space that runs the length of Teignmouth, the seaside town in Devon where they grew up. Now, 10 years on from their debut album, the trio’s daydream is to become a reality: for two nights next month (September 4 and 5), the town will play host to about 20,000 Muse fans. “I am,” says their drummer, Dominic Howard, “trying really hard not to start thinking, ‘Told you so.’” Dan Cairns

When they were teenagers, the three members of Muse would sometimes fantasise about playing a gig at the Den, a lawned space that runs the length of Teignmouth, the seaside town in Devon where they grew up. Now, 10 years on from their debut album, the trio’s daydream is to become a reality: for two nights next month (September 4 and 5), the town will play host to about 20,000 Muse fans. “I am,” says their drummer, Dominic Howard, “trying really hard not to start thinking, ‘Told you so.’”

If the concerts offer vindication as Muse launch their new album, The Resistance, they also provide their non-local followers with an opportunity to visit a place that shaped Muse indelibly. Ten years ago, with the release of Showbiz, the band emerged into a British music scene still ankle-deep in the dregs of Britpop. Their first album’s blend of falsetto, rococo rock, classical influences and melodrama was dismissed in some quarters as “pop Radiohead”. Their bassist, Chris Wolstenholme, who still lives in the town, remembers the period vividly: “We felt like we were on our own. There wasn’t any scene you could be a part of. And what was going on musically at the time in Britain was something we just didn’t connect to at all.” I met them at the time — they bristled with surly paranoia, their lips curling in contempt. And I was a fan.

“It wasn’t like being one among 2,000 bands that play in Camden every month,” Wolstenholme continues. “Without even hearing the music, people were going, ‘Who’s this band from... Devon?’”

Millions of album sales on, and with cupboards’ worth of best-live-band awards to their name, Muse are now an international success. Yet if their own surliness has disappeared, some of the old critical back-covering or hostility endures. It may seem a strange thing to say about a band who, in 2007, sold out two nights at the newly reopened Wembley stadium in a matter of minutes, but in a sense Muse remain outsiders. Looking back through even the rave album reviews, you are struck by how sheepish, qualified and at times defensive the praise often seems. Their lead singer, guitarist and principal songwriter, Matt Bellamy, would often be painted — with, it has to be said, some encouragement from him — as a space cadet, obsessed with conspiracy theories, writing songs with titles such as Knights of Cydonia, Supermassive Black Hole and Apocalypse Please, and banging on about Berlioz and the big bang. It became easy to depict Muse as somehow calculatingly weird, as musically indigestible, as three people who took themselves very seriously indeed.

Sitting on the balcony at the band’s beautiful wood and glass rehearsal space in the hills inland from their home town, Bellamy doesn’t look remotely serious. Sure, he has already launched into a passion­ate soliloquy about Geoism (the land-tax movement inspired by the 19th-century political econo­mist Henry George), bemoaned the stranglehold of the whipping system on parliamentary demo­cracy, taken aim at banking bonuses and evangelised about Oliver Sacks’s research into the effects of music on the brain in his book Musicophilia. But Bellamy is soon moving on, with a chuckle like a naughty schoolboy’s, to the artwork for the band’s new single, Uprising. I ask if the image — a field full of teddy bears in military formation — will be repeated in the video. “We’d like to do something with the teddies, definitely,” Bellamy giggles. “The idea is to have this large group of them staging an uprising, causing chaos; on a protest march outside parliament, that sort of thing. I’ve always found that side of human psychology fasci­nating; the way that we project our emotions onto things such as pets, toys, objects. So a large group of toy bears forming a sinister teddy uprising might be interesting.”

Music’s effect on Bellamy’s brain might interest Sacks. When he formed the band with Howard and Wolstenholme at school, Bellamy was writing songs inspired by his anger at the doubters around him and his desperation to escape from Devon and see the world. One of Muse’s earliest and unlikeliest fans was, in Bellamy’s words, an “army-major-type” figure who attended all their shows and informed them that he heard in their music traces of the Romantic composers — Berlioz, Chopin, Lizst — he loved.

A visit to the music buff’s home proved the catalyst for a succession of increasingly grandiose albums. “We went round,” Bellamy recalls, “and he played us all these great recordings, at ear-splitting volume. It was mind-blowing.”

The most common phrases used to describe Muse are “overblown” and “over the top”. The fact that The Resistance closes with what Bellamy calls the “very ironically titled” Exogenesis: Symphony — an orchestrated three-movement sequence about mankind abandoning earth and populating another planet — will, no doubt, cause such phrases to be rolled out again. For Bellamy, though, his work is rather restrained. He isn’t, he insists, merely a “dabbler” in classical music; it’s more complicated than that: “A lot of Muse songs, in my mind, were probably far more elaborate and more orchestrated in the way that I heard them. I often imagine them played by a symphony orchestra, or sung by a large choir, or in an operatic setting. If you have that sort of active imagination, you’re going to be drawn towards classical music. It’s difficult not to sound aloof, but if anything, I’d say I’m dabbling in rock. People associate the band with science fiction, with theories about the universe, about geo­politics and all that sort of stuff, and I’ve certainly gone on a lot about those things, but I think one of the reasons I’ve moved towards them is because, when I’m hearing or thinking about a certain piece of music, it can conjure up such large, existential-type feelings, emotions and ideas.

“If I’d been listening to Berlioz or Beethoven in the 19th century, I would probably have said to you, ‘I’m hearing the sound of God.’ In the modern secular world, and given the fact that I’m not religious, I turn to other subjects, be it ideas about space, or political questions.”

Before it reaches Exogenesis, the album veers giddily and recklessly from glam-rock to R&B, from music that sounds like disintegrating Bach to moments where great explosions of Queen-like vocals give way to a Chopin nocturne, or an excerpt from a Saint-Saëns opera dissolves into a soundscape that conjures up a particularly malign Weimar cabaret show. If you’re a purse-lipped musical dyspeptic, this won’t be for you. For lovers of a rich and wildly varied sonic diet, however, The Resistance represents the full groaning board.

Lyrically, it develops Bellamy’s preoccupation with disenfranchisement and protest, and draws on the impact George Orwell’s 1984 had on him as he was writing the album. But his tongue is always hovering near his cheek. “When we were recording Eurasia,” Wolsten­holme recalls, “we were rolling around on the floor laughing. And we thought, ‘We can’t take that bit out, because then it wouldn’t make us laugh any more.’”

Well, they’re laughing now. Two homecoming-hero shows by the sea. The realisation that they may not need to see themselves as outsiders any more. And, with luck, an end to reviews that wrap praise in sheepishness. Muse have made an album of genius, brilliance and beauty. What’s the point in being defensive about that?

Uprising is released on Sept 7 on Warners; The Resistance follows on Sept 14

See also


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