muse's black holes & revelations
SPACE, the final frontier...
alright, i'll admit it, that was a pretty cheesy opening, but gimme a break. that's the first thing that pops into my head when i listen to muse: the far reaches of outer space. and with good reason too. muse are the epitome of space rock. their music is soaked in synth-pop stylings and tie-dye psychedelia and it's chock-full of astrological references and sci-fi lore, but that's not all...
their music goes beyond the confines of space rock. it's like their style is stuck in some phenomenal time-warp, tangled in the wrinkled fabric of spacetime, somehow simultaneously in two places at once. a paradoxically contradicting oxymoronic riddle wrapped in a enigma. yup, that's muse in a nutshell. they're kinda like schrödinger's cat—god, don't you just hate obscure physics terms! on the one hand, the music's part enlightenment-age, on the other hand, part space-age. 18th century baroque meets 21st century prog-rock. and of course, there's that not-so-subtle oh-so-sultry spanish tinge that pops up from time to time. all in all, this protean quality makes black holes & revelations one ginormous clusterfuck of musical styles and, at the same time, one helluva great album.
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stardate 000000001: take a bow . . .
houston, we have lift-off...
a synthesizer cyclone of pentatonic flurries, right outa
pink floyd's dark side of the moon cascading
like a black-and-white tornado all over
the monochrome flatlands of Kansas
sucking you into its violent wake
spitting you back out into the
middle of a RAVE! with a
techno drum beat kicking
in with a trance-inducing
unce-unce-unce until
the song reaches its
climax, collapses
on itself with the
mighty roar of
feedback and
the hiss of
static
.
stardate 000000002: starlight . . .
it's comforting to know that some things never change, even throughout the ages. case-in-point: the torch song, a time-honored genre with a looong and colorful history, all the way back to when adam met eve. the 15th-century heartbreaker "greensleeves" set the standard, but the 21st century's "starlight" does the genre justice. the only substantial difference i can tell is in instrumentation; forgoing ye olde harp in place of some angry-sounding newfangled electromatic thingamajigs. it's still got all the sentimental heartrending lyrics, bitter-sweet harmonies, and tear-jerking melodies you've come to except from the torch song. star-crossed lovers, eat your ever-lovin' hearts out.
stardate 000000003: supermassive black hole. . .
CAUTION: DANGER:
Hard Hat Area High Voltage
cold and industrial, this gas-guzzling blues-rock engine runs on shitloads of rocket fuel. the distorted guitar torque propels its piston-driven heart and pumps out alto-vocal coolant by the gallon. the hydraulic pounding of the steam-hammer kick-drum, the sharp pop of the pneumatic boltgun snare, the sizzle of electricity, the grind of metal-on-metal...these are the sounds of the killing floor or, better yet, the cruel inner workings of some beautiful and unholy resurrection machine.
stardate 000000004: map of the problematique. . .
some people would describe muse's style as futuristic and they'd be half right. their style's futuristic to be certain, but what kind of future is it exactly? anwser: a retro-dystopian future. it sounds like orwell's 1984 or kubrick's 2001. what william s. gibson would call the Raygun Gothic. a dystopian soundscape of spaced-out guitar effects, horrorshow synthesizers, and, in the background, a cybernetic chorus chanting sacred hymns in lines of binary code.
set phasers to DEATOMIZE.
stardate 000000005: soldier's poem . . .
if this song was a person, it'd be the quiet type. a sleepy-headed 6/8 tempo, like a lullaby. spare instrumentation at first that then blossoms in a fiery-petaled bloom of fioritura vocal harmonies. here muse calls upon the crooning ghost of freddie mercury in a spectral musical séance and bring back to life the long-extinct barbershop quartet in order to genetically engineer this simple song into a sweet ambrosian rhapsody.
stardate 000000006: invincible . . .
not your typical power ballad,
this is a nuclear-power ballad.
this is the ballad of the future...today!
it's got an anthemic quality thanks to the textural guitar lines galore and the pipe-organ backdrop, not to mention these uplifting bubble-gum lyrics with a vocal delivery so over-the-top it almost makes me wanna puke. the anthem turns downright militant with the march-beat snare rolls. the sound, it's all very familiar. it's all very U2. and then comes the dark shift...
a brief interlude, like a solar eclipse,
the fuzzed bass guitar casting a long aeolian shadow
over the song's sunny demeanor until it...
ERUPTS!
in an orgiastic flourish of pitch-shifted fret-tapping guitar,
like the sun reemerging from behind the moon,
splattering the sky with a flaming triple-sec colored dawn,
bathing everything in its DigiTechnicolored ionian magnificence.
stardate 000000007: assassin . . .
this drop-d headbanger-kebab certainly lives up to its name. dark and angry, like a rampaging member of the bloodthirsty hashashin sprinting through the harsh desert, stiletto glinting in the cruel arabian sunlight. this song shows no mercy. it takes no prisoners.
stardate 000000008: exo-politics . . .
nothin fancy here, just a straight-forward full-speed-ahead hyperdrive-engaged balls-to-the-wall riff-driven badass-motherfucker of a rock n roll romp. 'nuff said.
stardate 000000009: city of delusion . . .
now, they're bringin out the big guns, amigos. first, the acoustic strummings of a renegade guitar, then comes the polyrhythmic plunking of a guerilla bass, crafting a dark and violent interstellar tango, as the string section howls underneath it all, like the souls of the damned at the hands of the conquistador trumpet. this song brings about pure miltonic Pandemonium. its intensity waxes and wanes like the phases of the moon, from the hushed synth-bass breakdowns to the blinding intensity of the havoc-wreaking choruses.
stardate 000000010: hoodoo . . .
flamenco music...IN SPACE!
one moment, the runaway gypsy guitar's propelling you upward, like zorro gallivanting on his trusty black steed, until you reach escape velocity and breach the earth's atmosphere. then, the next moment, it leaves you floating aimlessly through space on slow-plucked whammied chords. this is followed by a crescendo of bone-crushing arpeggiated piano-rolls, like tidal waves crashing on some distant alien shore. then back to the hushed zero-g interstellar gyspy-guitar coasting. yes, the 180-degree shifts will give you motion sickness.
stardate 000000011: knights of cydonia . . .
first,
a build-up
of slapbacked
surf guitar twang
climbing the dorian scale
building a pyramid of sound
tremoloing down into an ominous
logarithmic sequence of modulations
all done amidst a watery guitar-line buzzing
electric like the flight of a bumblebee soaring
over the Giza Necropolis as apocalyptic prophesies
sound from the trumpets of ancient astronauts heralding
the simmering breakdown section: a bleating robotic choir,
their vocoded voices in quicksilver falsetto bursting into heavy
metal riffage that spirals out of control until the prophecy is fulfilled.
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yes, muse got what the good Dr. Gonzo would call "a rising sound" á la jefferson airplane's "white rabbit." they're all about the overall shape of their music, all about contour, the gentle crescendo, the build-up, the breakdown, the climax and, of course, these guys are all about balance, all about symmetry. you can hear this within the individual songs themselves and, in a wider scope, the album in its entirety. clearly these guys are big-picture thinkers. they don't so much play music as they do sculpt it from a monumental wall of sound into a flawlessly-proportioned vitruvian-man-lookin' work of art.
jolly good show, ya limey grandstanding trekkie bastards!
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