Amid the high-rolling trad-rock echoes - lashings of Queen-y pomp U2's The Unforgettable Fire on the heart-swelling 'Invincible' - it's evident that Muse have been grooving on uplifting house, as disco beats, acid crescendos and Robert Miles-style two-finger piano melodies abound. Unusually for agit-pop, the musical backdrops are ambitious, exhilarating, sometimes ineffably beautiful. Almost throughout, Bellamy's political awakening unfolds: on the prettily arpeggiated 'Soldier's Poem', the growly 'Assassin' and the crunching 'Exo-Politics' (key lyric: 'when diseases fill the skies, it's just our leaders in disguise'). The spectre of eco-horror also hovers behind the song. The single, 'Supermassive Black Hole', thunderingly mixes Automatic-era Jesus and Mary Chain with a Prince-like funk, and boasts lyrics like, 'Oo, baby, I'm a fool for you' - not the doings of a gothy navel-gazer. Here, Bellamy, now 28, steps from the shadows: of Radiohead, of his erstwhile lyrical introspection. With 2003's Absolution, the Devon-sent trio graduated to Britrock's Serie A, upholding OK Computer's stadium-angst long after Radiohead themselves had chosen to abandon it.Īs a performer, Bellamy began to cut an intriguingly mysterious figure - flamboyant, virtuoso, a kind of mute fret-fiddling cyborg who wanted nothing of celebrity. Those, like your correspondent, who had filed Muse merely as a subsection of Radiohead are instantly forced to reassess. This curtain-raiser, bitterly entitled 'Take a Bow', is a real smack in the chops, not just for George W or his British accomplice. You will burn in hell for your sins!' A trance/dance beat raises the temperature, until Bellamy's guitar explodes into portentous early-Seventies humungity and - thunderbolt and lightning, very, very frightening! - a multi-tracked army of Bellamy voices level their final delirious curses: 'You must pay for your crimes against the earth!' 'You cast a spell on the country you run,' whispers Matt Bellamy, hatefully, as the sense of dread escalates. A frantic, circling synthesised overture opens Muse's fourth album on an ominous note.
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