In a parallel universe, sometime in the late 80’s in Devon, a kindly music teacher took a young boy called Matthew to the blackboard and said I’d like you to write the following 100 times please Matthew:
I will show restraint and remember that sometimes less is more.
In that parallel universe I like Muse a lot more than I do in this one.
The first minute of the album isn’t a great start for me. Intro and the beginning of Apocalypse Please set a tone of bombast and self-importance that alienated me (a bit rich coming from me but I only inflict my self-importance on my family and internet unfortunates like you lot, not on millions across the world). From there, despite liking a reasonable amount of it in small doses, I struggled to like this as a whole album. Songs like Time Is Running Out are fine to listen to on their own but when multiple songs culminate in a similar fashion it becomes a bit wearing for me. I did have high hopes on first listen because the early part of Sing For Absolution starts in pleasing contrast to what had gone before and implies the album might pace itself nicely, but by three minutes in we were back to a similar style of crescendo as the previous tracks, which was beginning to sound semi-hysterical, and this set the tone for the album as a whole for me. Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory simply through an inability to rein it in.
Part of my issue is the way Matt Bellamy delivers his falsetto vocals, in fact all his vocals, as if he is singing the most important lyric ever delivered. Even when there is a welcome change of pace, he doesn’t seem to be able to vary his vocals to fit them. Maybe it’s a case of not willing rather than not able, because for example in chunks of Falling Away with You he manages to restrain himself but then it’s like he decides ‘I’ve gone a whole two minutes without emoting, fuck that for a game of soldiers’. To be fairer he manages to some degree on Blackout and Endlessly but these two on their own are insufficient to create the level of light and shade I really wanted to hear.
I also think there’s pretensions here of being a bit ‘more’ than rock music but the issue for me is it doesn’t create the sense of theatre that I think it hopes to, not only is Bellamy’s voice not strong enough to carry it off across an album but also the music is sometime too busy to create any depth of atmosphere. It begins to sound jittery rather than powerful, which might be the intent but to me diminishes what would be their finer points. Contrast this with a very different type of album that we’ve reviewed, Curtains by Tindersticks. This too had a very distinctive and arguably devise singer but because the overall style of the music was much less frenetic than this album, it managed to achieve its filmic aspirations in the way I don’t think this one manages.
Don’t get me wrong it’s far from awful but there’s a difference between having great skills and knowledge and then deploying them in the service of creating a great song and more to the point a great album. Quite a few of the singles from this album I’m happy to listen to in isolation but together they are too much and the tracks that do show restraint are insufficient to create a rounded album for me.
6/10
