Your'e listening to Radioh-sorry, Muse's new album, Origin of The Bends. Or was it Origin of Symettry.
I just bought the new Muse album, Origin of Symmetry. Amazing stuff! I used to be a professional Muse hater, but now thanks to just randomly picking up the new album at my local CD shop (17 miles away...) I am now heavily in to Muse. Many people have described them as being extremely similar to Radiohead's older stuff (eg. The Bends), which I have to agree with. It is a heavy, angsty rock sound that is so listenable. Origin of Symmetry does seem very similar to The Bends, and this can only be a good thing. It's a bit heavier, and more radio-friendly than The Bends, and seems just as angsty.
The current singles we have had so far are Plug in Baby and New Born, both amazing tracks. Bliss is also in the grinding wheels of coming out. If like me, you watch quite a lot of music TV (like Kerrang!, MTV2 and Q, not the awful standard MTV pop-tripe), then you may have heard a fair bit from Muse in terms of their singles and their relevant videos. I find it very difficult to listen to Muse via my TV, and much prefer listening to it as an album. I haven't a clue why this is. It could be the fact that it is so random on MTV-esque channels, and you don't know what's coming next. And after channel-hopping through more crap than is spoken in Parliament in a day, then you aren't really in the mindset to listen to Muse.
01. New Born This is an amazing track, and opener. A wierd synthy introduction for around a minute-and-a-half, which is followed up by an absolutely storming guitar sound and the whole band properly kick in. This is an absolutely havoc-wreaking, heart-wrenching, gob-stopping (in a 'I-cant-think-up-any-more-words-to-describe-it' sorta way) track. Playing this through a nice big stereo really does blow you away. I can't stop listening to this track, and every radio play just enhances it. Radiohead did it with Creep, Muse are doing it with New Born, creating an infiniteably listenable angst album. Great stuff!
02. Bliss This is a similar synth sound to New Born, and could be thought of as New Born part 2. You don't have to wait too long for some relieving guitar sounds though, only about 15 seconds! This is a really happy song, based on the quite
positively written lyrics "Everything about you is how I'd wanna be / Your freedom comes naturally" and the title. But don't think this is a lie down on the couch, or cruising round the airport's departure lounge, drinking in Starbucks sort of track. Heavily distorted guitar, layered on to a sort of wall of sound, and heaps of synths and effects add some depth to one of the best songs on the album. This is the newest single from the album, and what a scorcher it is! This track just blows me away, and away again. "Everything about you is so easy to love / They're watching you from above"
03. Space Dementia Rolling piano introduction, with a long reverb effect makes you think you've gone to the Proms, not a Muse CD. A bitter sounding symphony of sounds, with quite a lot to mentally wade through between the rhythm and the vocals. Around 1:30, it all breaks again, and you get the second verse. Amazing stuff this angst, it infects your mind and causes you to get a disease to write great songs. Radiohead took too much, and then mixed it with too much stomach acid and bile, but Muse have just the right amount... It suddenly appears when you become 13, and disappears when your about 20. Then you become a sad aging wannabe teeny-angst rocker. Space Dementia is a very bizarre track, with a great orchestral sound rolling around and jumping in your head. It's another one of Muse's epic mad tracks. Brilliant!
04. Hyper Music Very strange intro, as if someone's savagely attacking the guitar's strings, then a positive sounding bouncing guitar sound and wailing. Then it starts playing normally. You just rock out to Muse so far and after a minute the vocals start going along slowly but merrily, jiving (?) with the guitar and exploring the notes moer than the lyrics. Muse put it best themselves, it's hyper music. It's music that makes you hyper.
05. Plug In Baby Another hot single! Muse show their guitar expertise with Plug In Baby, and their video clevernes with a great video (download it from www.muse-official.com if you haven't seen it - i am just downloading my copy of the video at the moment, the top quality version is only about 4 Mb! - 20 Mins on a 56K, well worth it...) This song is absolutely killer, just like all the other angst-ridden Muse tracks on the album, and will blow your head away and you'll need bottled oxygen after listening to this track. That's how great it is. Really. p.s. I have seen the video before, but while writing up this review, it finished downloading, so I can enjoy it even more!
06. Citizen Erased A really chilled number in comparison to all the tracks so far. Brilliant! You'll put it on and say 'Chilled?' with the accent on the question mark, but then after a minute it'll hit you. It gets chilled after a minute or two, more like 3, sorry. Q. 'So when's this -chilled- bit gonna be then?' A. It's coming, ah here it is... Amazing, not lying-down-on-beach-with-bikini-babes-around-me-in-Ibiza sorta chilled, but coming down off a rock-equivalent-of-ecstasy sort of high, this track just slowly pushes forward, passing slow signs in your mind ("OK, whatever" - Tom's subconscious). Bugger off sub-conscious, what have you done for me recentely... ("OK, I'll leave you alone" -Tom's SC). This is a great track, oozing with sliding, screaming, squelching guitars, hundreds of pounding guitars (if any of you sad guitar geeks read guitaring mags, you'll notice recentely one of them had an article on Muse's guitarist and they were talking about him shoving all sorts of bizarre stuff on to one of his guitar's involving sound boxes he'd bought of Arabian monks, and god knows what else, but I digress...). Probably one of the most epic, moving and bloody great tracks on the album. If it was a film, it would be the climax. Fortunately, it's not a film, it's a Citizen, who got erased...
07. Micro Cuts Citizen Erased then 'pumps' in to Micro Cuts, which also is absolutely brilliant. There is 'distorted vocal' sounds just rolling around through some kind of FX, along with bouncing sounds. The music just pushes forwards kicking away for a minute or two, and then it cools down to a drum-less, vocal-less heap of guitars, and they start reintroducing the instruments. This is another brilliant track that just runs rampant around your head, and blows your mind (OK, it's not -that- trippy...). The guitar sounds on Micro Cuts are brilliant as well.
08. Screenager Is it playing? Where's the sound? You hear windchimes and acoustic thumbings for a little while. Then, what's this wierd Afro-drummin' sound? Some kind of primal noise-making is going on here. Comparing this to say New Born is a near-impossible task. No more are there squealing guitars, blinding solos. Yet. Emotionally winding and brain-bendingly bizarre. It's leading to something... Here it comes, I hope... They do spend a long time building up tension. Is it going to break in to a massive guitar sound? No. It just wavers on unaware. You've made it so far. The vocals get freakier. This track's a bit annoying. You hope it's going to do a New Born and just transfer over to blinding guitar solos, but it continues with it's windchimes and acoustic guitar. It's a nice track, but annoying in that way.
09. Darkshines Comes in with unwavering beats and 'farout' guitars. Then good ol' Mr Bellamy starts singing. The typical quietness of Screenager is there, but it's building. Manic piano bashing. Screaming guitars. It's all coming out!! This is entertainment. It starts fluctuating between the lovely sound of Muse bashing it all away, and the driving sound of Muse building up tension towards the aformentioned event. And it all goes again. An amazing song, blasting it all out. More angst-ridden again.
10. Feeling Good What's this? Lounge music? Electric pianos? No way... OK, maybe not, but this does start with jumpy electric piano sounds and then kicks in with some lyrical content. Uplifting? Yes. Relaxing? Yes. But in a walking-rapidly-round-a-wood-happy sort of relaxation, not a chilling-with-the-homies sort of relaxation. It's almost laughing at chillout music, with it's string sounds and bounciness. Another brilliant track by Muse.
11. Megalomania This is it. One more track. One step left from that 'One Great Album' sticker!! Muse start it with a spacey, airy feel introduction. Any moment it's gonna break. But how? In a Screenager acoustic thumbing, bizarre 'effected' way. Then the church organ starts up!!?? Powerful sounds beating out with farout vocals in it's way. Then it cools down. Emotion just wash over. What was I thinking about? Where am I? What's my date of birth? That is the power of Muse. It continues like this for a while. Another great way to round off the Muse album.
OTHER GOOD LISTENING I know, I'm not the first person to say it, and if Muse were here they would kill me... Radiohead - The Bends I have been listening to it a lot recentely, and just like this album (in terms of cybernetic guitars and heavy distortion), these albums are very similar. The help of Mr Godrich (producer of both The Bends and Muse's Showbiz) might have destined this album to sound a bit like 'The Bends' but even so, that's no bad thing because Radiohead rock and so do Muse. Why can't they just cuddle up and be friends?? ;-)
INTERACTIVE ELEMENTS As with all modern CD albums, Origin of Symmetry has an interactive option, where you put it in to your computer and it does funny stuff. You basically need a Mac (with OS 8, a Power PC, 32MB RAM and QuickTime 3 or above... make that 5 then). Or if your using a smelly beige PC running Winblows, you'll need either the 95, 98, Nt4, or 2000 variety, a 400Mhz Pentium (bloody hell!), 32Mb RAM, a sound card and Quicktime 3 or above, as with Mac, make that 5 then... When I last tried the interactive option, it had a strong insistence to do absolutely nothing, but I will try again soon and list my efforts below. Perhaps it's because I had my machine on for about 3 days of solid use or something... God knows! Basically, you get access to an online TV channel, so can't be bad. As I mentioned in the Plug In Baby song review, you can download many of their videos from their website, muse-official.com. So do that!
This is such an emotionally-blinding, quality-blinding sound montage, that I challenge you not to like it. As the tacky-childrens-TV-show-motto goes: Miss It, Miss Out. Get this album. Or. Else.
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