Within the realms of pop music, it’s extremely easy to just hate everything. Show me a top ten singles listing and, generally, I’ll be viewing ten artists that I hate offering songs I’d liken to irritable bowel syndrome. However, once one gets ever-so-slightly out of the Billboard Hot 100 into other musical avenues, things get somewhat more complicated. While there’s still lot of bad music when musicians are writing their own songs and there’s not quite as much label control, one can generally find more redeeming features than in a production-line, carbon-copy pop star like Justin Bieber. It is in this somewhat more unpredictable musical realm that we find ourselves with Muse’s most recent album, “The 2nd Law.”
The album starts with a sleazy stoner rock riff echoing of Queens of The Stone Age and Them Crooked Vultures, soon intermingled with orchestral strings. For the rest of the track (named “Supremacy”), the sleazy rock sound and rather pompous symphonic sound are combined masterfully, and it does a good job of showing off vocalist/guitarist Matthew Bellamy’s killer pipes. Very few people have a creepier falsetto and it’s put to good use.
Conversely, the second song, “Madness,” is quiet and soft, and is the first song to include one of the album’s more notable features, dubstep elements. While dubstep is one of my preferred whipping boys and I do still have that same visceral hatred towards it, I will say it is used tastefully here. It fits with the songs where it’s used and the fact that it’s used to evoke a variety of moods over the course of “The 2nd Law” is rather impressive. I never thought I would say this, but Muse may have actually showed me that dubstep can have a valid place in music (providing it’s not the main style and is only occasionally used).
Unfortunately, while “2nd Law” and I started out frolicking through flower-laden fields together and romantically sipping from the same milkshake, the magic was ruined when it suddenly smashed the broken bottle of boring-ness and U2 rip-offs across my unsuspecting face. I don’t know what I did to deserve such a thing, but around track eight, the album just decides it will stop being good for a while; it goes from being a long, dull take on Queen to an exact stylistic copy of every U2 song ever (“Explorers” and “Big Freeze,” respectively). The next song is equally boring, and while there’s an awesome heavy song I actually quite like (“Liquid State”), prior to the two-part eponymous closing track,the damage was already done.
This, combined with the disappointingly anticlimactic title track that closes the album, left me feeling ambivalent about the album as a whole. It definitely has great parts and if it ended after the first seven songs, I probably would have given it a glowing review full of sunshine and rainbows, but to do so now feels disingenuous. Overall, I would still say the album has more good than bad in it and there’s a lot about it which I like, but a ten-minute stretch of badness and an unsatisfying ending mean a lot in a 43-minute album. Muse is a very good band, but in order to truly be great, they need to stop emulating other artists and embrace the unique sound which they so expertly wield over the album’s first half. That said, I can’t bring myself to hate an album which has a song as fun and silly as “Panic Station.” So I guess you get off this time, Muse… Just don’t push your luck.
The album starts with a sleazy stoner rock riff echoing of Queens of The Stone Age and Them Crooked Vultures, soon intermingled with orchestral strings. For the rest of the track (named “Supremacy”), the sleazy rock sound and rather pompous symphonic sound are combined masterfully, and it does a good job of showing off vocalist/guitarist Matthew Bellamy’s killer pipes. Very few people have a creepier falsetto and it’s put to good use.
Conversely, the second song, “Madness,” is quiet and soft, and is the first song to include one of the album’s more notable features, dubstep elements. While dubstep is one of my preferred whipping boys and I do still have that same visceral hatred towards it, I will say it is used tastefully here. It fits with the songs where it’s used and the fact that it’s used to evoke a variety of moods over the course of “The 2nd Law” is rather impressive. I never thought I would say this, but Muse may have actually showed me that dubstep can have a valid place in music (providing it’s not the main style and is only occasionally used).
Unfortunately, while “2nd Law” and I started out frolicking through flower-laden fields together and romantically sipping from the same milkshake, the magic was ruined when it suddenly smashed the broken bottle of boring-ness and U2 rip-offs across my unsuspecting face. I don’t know what I did to deserve such a thing, but around track eight, the album just decides it will stop being good for a while; it goes from being a long, dull take on Queen to an exact stylistic copy of every U2 song ever (“Explorers” and “Big Freeze,” respectively). The next song is equally boring, and while there’s an awesome heavy song I actually quite like (“Liquid State”), prior to the two-part eponymous closing track,the damage was already done.
This, combined with the disappointingly anticlimactic title track that closes the album, left me feeling ambivalent about the album as a whole. It definitely has great parts and if it ended after the first seven songs, I probably would have given it a glowing review full of sunshine and rainbows, but to do so now feels disingenuous. Overall, I would still say the album has more good than bad in it and there’s a lot about it which I like, but a ten-minute stretch of badness and an unsatisfying ending mean a lot in a 43-minute album. Muse is a very good band, but in order to truly be great, they need to stop emulating other artists and embrace the unique sound which they so expertly wield over the album’s first half. That said, I can’t bring myself to hate an album which has a song as fun and silly as “Panic Station.” So I guess you get off this time, Muse… Just don’t push your luck.
RSS Feed