Muse – The Resistance
Muse
The Resistance
Warner Bros.
Hi, I’m Meathead. I was walking down the street the other day and just happened to notice a sign stapled onto a telephone pole. The sign was black with bold white text that said simply “THEY WILL NOT CONTROL US.” Maybe I’m a little quick to judge, but my impression was that whatever the sign was referring to is probably pretty fucking stupid. Sure enough, I soon learned that it was an advertisement for the latest absolutely perfect and breathtaking masterpiece by everyone’s favorite KROQ darlings who aren’t the Silversun Pickups: Muse. My impression was correct, after all. Because I have nothing better to do with my life, I’ve decided to override my better judgment and [legally purchase] Muse’s new album The Resistance from [the popular iTunes website].
Maybe I’m just a little slow, but I’m not really understanding what it is we’re supposed to be resisting here, aside from music that isn’t insanely pretentious and singers that don’t sound like Dollar Store Thom Yorke (as if regular Thom Yorke is anything to write home about these days, but that’s another story). Yeah man, resist! Fight the power! Don’t let them control us! You know, the oppressive, vague and shadowy “them!” What in the motherfuck does Muse know about oppression? They’re a bunch of pasty white guys from an upper-crust seaside town in southern England. I mean, far be it from me to imply that they’re posers, so instead I’ll just come out and say straight out that they’re posers. The Resistance is a textbook example of a band desperate to make a grandiose artistic/political statement but lacking anything to actually make a statement about (see also: Limp Bizkit – The Unquestionable Truth (Part 1)).
The opening song, “Uprising,” contains the profound lyric “Rise up and take the power back/it’s time that the fat cats had a heart attack/you know that their time is coming to an end.“ You mean like the fat cats at Warner Bros., who financed, publicized and released The Resistance? The evil, soulless corporate whores who sign your paychecks? Yeah, you stick it to ‘em, lead singer Matthew Bellamy! Che Guevara, or whatever!
Apparently Matthew has been taking singing lessons and is very eager to show off his mastery of the vocal technique known as vibrato, seeing as he does it at practically every available opportunity on the album. Hey Matt, even Freddie Mercury (whom you are not) turned it down a notch from time to time. Just about every line on this record is sung with such forced urgency that you’d almost think he’s actually saying something meaningful. Then you realize he’s singing shit like “love is our resistance.” Seriously, that’s a real line from a song. I bet he thought he was hot shit when he put that tripe down on paper. And when he runs out of actual words, he never hesitates to fall back on that old standby: “woooooaaaaahhh.”
I believe the exact moment where The Resistance officially jumps the shark, or rather jumps over itself jumping the shark, takes place at the ass-end of the song with the impossibly idiotic title, “United States of Eurasia (+Collateral Damage).” At roughly the 3:45 mark, the song transitions from the band’s desperate attempt to be Queen into what I can only assume is the “(+Collateral Damage)” part, which turns out to be a fucking piano recital of Nocturne in E flat major, Op. 9, No. 2 by Chopin. Muse demands to be taken seriously as musicians, and the best way to achieve this, naturally, is to awkwardly tack on a Frédéric Chopin piece at the end of one of your shitty songs. Just think, maybe in another 200 years, bands will be doing the same thing, except with Muse pieces! I’m sure Matthew Bellamy thinks so!
After what seems to be an eternity of self-important schlock rock saturated with Bellamy’s ever-present vibrato – you know, the type of music that the easily impressed might refer to as “epic” – the album finally settles into the final act. And what better way for a band to conclude an overwrought, highfalutin’ concept record than with a painfully long, drawn out number that’s pointlessly divided into segments, then getting their Geddy Lee on and giving said segments the most pretentious names imaginable? You know, like “Exogenesis: Symphony Part I (Overture),” “Exogenesis: Symphony Part II (Cross Pollination)” and “Exogenesis: Symphony Part III (Redemption).” Sounds like a party to me. Unfortunately, “Exogenesis: Symphony Part IV (Suck My Ass)” was left out of the album’s final tracklisting. The “Exogenesis” trilogy sounds just as cock-slobberingly pretentious as you might imagine, full of sweeping strings and arpeggios and glissandos and, oh yeah, vibrato.
Muse is, without a doubt, a band deeply in love with themselves. They haven’t just crossed the line into self-parody; they’ve dove headfirst into it by crapping out a record that is all concept and none of that annoying “substance” stuff. It’s a cynical ploy to cash in on that inherent adolescent need to rebel against something, which is more than a little pathetic coming from a trio of guys in their thirties. Say what you will about Rage Against The Machine (and there’s plenty to be said), but at least Zack de la Rocha tended to refer to specific things in his anti-establishment rants, as opposed to simply throwing out vague buzzwords and trendy catchphrases for fans to sing along to at concerts.
I suppose the good news is that, generally, once a band hits the “rock opera” phase of their career, the “break up” phase isn’t far behind. Fingers crossed!
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As much as I like Muse, I agree with pretty much all of your arguments here. The new album sucks pretty goddamn hard.