I’ve had a difficult relationship with Muse. When I first
got a taste for them I was very young – back when I was hooked by the blunt
aggression of nu metal bands with names like Staind and Disturbed, Muse seemed
to offer a more cerebral, thoughtful alternative that I could still jump around
on the sofa to.
But since 2006’s Black Holes and Revelations, I came to
realise that to call Muse intelligent was something of a misnomer, akin to
calling Michael Bay’s Transformers series science fiction. They deal with
subjects as intriguing as space travel and government surveillance, sure, but
they do so with cartoonish simplicity – often venturing only as far as ‘this is
bad, be scared’, or ‘we can’t let them get away with this’.
I can’t help feeling sorry for them, however. I catch myself feeling a
little hurt when they’re criticised, feeling obliged to defend them. But then I
realise – they’re a huge rock band, with a global fan base of loyal followers,
and don’t need me to defend them. And then I realise that I’m often defending
them from my own criticisms. I brand them silly and embarrassingly uncool, but I
try to let it slide because I know they can be interesting and, occasionally,
brilliant.
In steps new single Psycho, billed as a ‘back to basics’
rock song that strips away some of the more experimental elements of recent
albums and gets back to the three-guys-in-a-room setup of the band’s early
days. It certainly feels that way upon first pressing play, as you’re greeted
by an incendiary riff and the sound of the band mauling their instruments.
However, unease sets in with a chord change straight out of Uprising – Muse
have apparently mastered the art of making guitar riffs sound exactly like
cheesy political commentaries.
Yep, Psycho keeps up the political bent, and is so
on-the-nose with its anti-war sentiment it might as well be a US drone hurtling
straight into your nasal passages. It’s massively melodramatic, but have Muse
ever been particularly grounded?
Even on Origin of Symmetry, the lofty theatricality was very
much abundant. But the core of why it worked on that album, and subsequently
Absolution, was that Bellamy succeeded in playing the part of
alien-cyborg-messenger from God. He removed himself effectively, allowing the
music to create a character and cover any inkling that the voice bellowing lines like ‘Take off your
disguise, I know that underneath it's me’ was at all human.
So, when the band made the decision to ‘strip it back’, they
seem to have forgotten that they’ve got nothing to really strip it back to. They’ve
always been daft and overblown. It’s like Michael Bay deciding to rediscover
his roots and return to the intricate storytelling and detailed characters of
Bad Boys.
Bellamy’s decision to
take a more grounded, direct approach to lyrics, too, means that a great deal
of your attention falls upon his words, which stand up to about as much scrutiny
as your 5-year-old’s story about the wizard who lost his shoes.
He does sound more human, so mission accomplished I suppose,
but he also sounds like an idiot. When he screeches ‘I’m gonna make you a
fucking psycho’ in harmony with a high-pitched guitar squall, you groan rather
than jump out of your seat, and hope to God that he came up with the lyrics in a
couple of minutes in the studio, and only realised when the track was released that
he forgot to swap them out for something less cringeworthy. Thankfully, when
Bellamy shuts up, the song isn’t a chore to listen to – cheesy and repetitive
for sure, but brawny, with urgency and clarity.
This song could still be Muse having as much fun as they did on
2nd Law tracks like Panic Station, with all the ‘back to basics’ stuff simply
rhetoric and fan placation. But given the serious tone of the music and the
dorky Drill Sergeant speech samples, it’s hard to say for sure.
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