It’s rare that I buy an album. Even more rare that I spin the album all the way through more than a few times before cherry picking my favorite tracks. What’s most rare though, is when I repeatedly listen to an album over & over again so soon after buying it. Yet that’s what’s happened with Muse’s The Resistance, a slice of rock magnificence. Echoing touches of Queen, electronica, classical piano, and grunge, Muse has evolved yet again, taking what they learned from their previous effort, Black Holes and Revelations, and bumping things up yet another notch.
The album kicks off with “Uprising”, a pulsing dance/rock tune driven by an overdriven/distorted octave bass figure. Handclaps are used to great effect, with unison distorted guitar/falsetto vocals punctuating each statement of the verse. The whole song is, according to Matt Bellamy (the group’s lead vocalist/guitarist/pianist), “…expresses a general mistrust of bankers, global corporations and politicians.”
Things move on from there to the love anthem “Resistance”, which is glued together by a floating piano figure, and again, pushed along by the bass, but this time a driving sixteenth-note figure in the verse, which is then passed on to the hi-hats in the pre-chorus. Really a cool way to hand off the rhythmic duties, and the chorus breaks it up nicely by dropping into an eighth-note groove. The Matt Bellamy’s liner notes from the iTunes LP state that the song is based on the love story from George Orwell’s 1984, but more generally is “…also about any love which crosses boundaries such as religion or strong political beliefs and the subsequent recognition of the unimportance and divisiveness of such beliefs.”
“Undisclosed Desires”, the next track, is an abrupt shift in groove for the group, with a very dance/R&B feel to it, with the pizzicato strings & broken up drum beat. The whole song has a cool texture to it, and is fun to listen to.
“United States of Eurasia” is musically very fascinating; it’s heavily influenced by Ravel & Tchaikovsky, and also features some obvious “eastern” sounds throughout, utilizing the harmonic minor scale. It segues into “Collateral Damage”, a solo piano piece featuring Chopin’s “Nocturne, Op. 9 No. 2” with sound effects. Bellamy’s liner notes state “The song is from an imaginary musical about a ‘United States of Eurasia’, the search for peace and the accidental creation of a new super power challenging American primacy.”
The whole album seems to bounce back and forth between heavily political tracks followed by love songs. Easily exemplified by the next tune, “Guiding Light”, which is another love song and is definitely straight-up stadium rock.
“Unnatural Selection” is probably my second favorite track, starting off with church organ and Matt singing through a filter, then kicking into high gear with a pounding guitar & drum bit before the bass joins up for a unison guitar/bass/drums figure. The song is reminiscent of the group’s earlier song “Hysteria”, although it’s more varied in its rhythmic and harmonic content. The song itself is about the “winner take all” world we live in, and that “if you can’t beat them, join them.”
“MK Ultra” is probably the only track I could take or leave. It’s good, but doesn’t quite stand up against the rest of the album. The pre-chorus and chorus are definitely the better parts of the song, but it’s still the weak point of the album.
“I Belong to You / Mon cœur s’ouvre à ta voix” is definitely my personal favorite. The groovy piano bit, and the envelope filtered bass track, it’s got a really cool funky groove to it, and the second part of the title refers to the fact that the middle section is from the aria of the same name from Camille Saint-Saens’ opera Samson and Delilah. This is followed by, of all things, a bass clarinet solo. Bellamy describes this as being something they “…wanted to sound like a theme tune from a children’s TV program featuring teddy bears in a garden.” Like I said, the inspirations are varied & sometimes bizarre.
The last three tracks on the album are actually three movements of a larger work called “Exogenesis”. Definitely a reach for the group, I think it shows just how large their vision and scope can be, and I hope to see more like this from the group. Here I’ll just quote Bellamy from the iTunes LP liner notes regarding this work, as I definitely cannot explain it any better:
This 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 civilisation will end. Part 2 is a desparate 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 will happen all over again.
So yeah, deep subject matter there, but I expect nothing less from Muse. The first movement seems to have the larger of the Floyd influence, with the second movement beginning like a mix of Rachmaninov/Chopin, then diminuendoing into something more Chopin before the rock kicks back in. The last lines of the second movement is quite eloquent:
Tell us, what is your final wish?
Now we know you can never return
Tell us, what is your final wish?
We will tell it to the world
The last movement I read as more than just the realization that we need to change, but the determination that we will change, because we must. It begins very quietly, slowly building into an earnest promise to get it right, before ending with a quiet piano/strings coda.
