Review: Muse – The Resistance (2009)
It’s not so much that Muse’s Matt – sorry, Matthew – Bellamy is a D-class lyricist, per se; plenty of lousy writers write good music. It’s not even the bombastic theatricality; Queen, Kate Bush… hell, even Rammstein know how to make that work. No, what makes The Resistance such a hard sell is that Bellamy and Muse seem to have no idea how ridiculous their music is.
Granted, this is not news. It was this same quality that gave us a handful of giggles listening to 2006′s Black Holes and Revelations, though, by whatever voodoo, that album took the band’s tragic self-seriousness and twisted it into a kind of comic performance art. That most of the album also was a heck of a lot of fun was almost secondary – it worked.
Unfortunately, The Resistance falls prey to Bellamy’s worst musical instincts. Where Black Holes overcame subpar lyrics with catchy melodies and some hilariously brash instrumentation, The Resistance offers only occasional such bursts of inspiration. It’s in these moments that the band is at its “Hysteria”-level best, and tracks such as “Unnatural Selection” and “MK Ultra” successfully flirt with the operatic without succumbing to it. Sadly, these moments are too few and far between, and much of the rest of the album flounders under the band’s hamfisted self-absorption. The stunningly misguided faux-Queen ballad “United States of Eurasia / Collateral Damage” is ground zero here, an painfully constipated conglomerate of every bad idea the band’s ever had, a kind of trashy Euro-unity anthem that speaks in nothing but cliché ambiguities and winds up making such little sense that it’s hardly more than a punchline.
Muse’s “United States of Eurasia / Collateral Damage,” from The Resistance.
And there’s the rub.
These guys are dead serious about what they do. They actually believe that they’re sending a message, and that’s where the whole thing comes crashing down. When Matt Bellamy croons and howls “these wars, they can’t be won / and do you want them to go on and on and on / why split these States when there can be ONLY ONE?” there’s not the slightest trace of a smile. You can almost see the band, glistening with sweat under the searing stage lights, gazing out over their admiring audience, knowing that they’ve just changed the world for the better.
Okay, so maybe music is fundamentally self-absorbed. But, most of the time, it’s self-absorbed in such a way that it’s palatable. Example: We write songs in the first person singular, speaking mostly in ‘I’s or ‘you’s or the occasional ‘we’. By this we create the illusion of conversation. This is a good thing. It makes the music personal, and the listener more willing to forgive an author’s cheesier sentiments. When Bellamy sings “I thought I was a fool for no-one / ooh, baby I’m a fool for you / you are the Queen of the Superficial / how long before you tell the truth?” on “Supermassive Black Hole”, it’s corny, but, even if only within the strata of pop music’s decades-thick layer cake du fromage, it works.
On The Resistance, however, Bellamy often adopts the same irritatingly smug “us vs. them” outlook that makes political rallies so universally appreciated. As a result, the much of the album feels like a rambling, fist-pumping tirade to an imaginary, or at least immaterial, crowd of like-minded wingnuts. In this context, the band’s lyrical shortcomings are even more obvious – tenuous grasp of flow and mechanics aside, there’s simply no poignancy here, just a litany of shallow, tepidly-linked catchphrases railing against unidentified evil (“’interchanging mind control / come, let the revolution take its toll / if you could flick a switch and open your third eye / you’d see that we should never be afraid to die” – “Uprising”). The Flaming Lips, on 2006′s “The W.A.N.D. (The Will Always Negates Defeat),” knew enough to get that if you’re going to bitch about the mysterious Them, it only makes sense to give some hint of who They might be, or else you’re just screaming pointlessly into the night. Unfortunately for Muse, there’s a lot of screaming pointlessly into the night going on here.
We won’t even get into the band’s systemic bastardization of classical music (ripped off and repackaged for the masses!), as it’s a known quantity and if you’re still listening to Muse by this point you’ve probably already come to grips with it.
That said (as much as “That” may have been), the album is not a total abortion. There’s some fun to be had here, rocking-out to be done, giggles to be giggled, etc. Rather, it feels as though the band’s more frustrating historical tendencies are beginning to catch up with them. In some ways The Resistance is, then, a quintessential Muse album. Perhaps it’s just that the quintessence of Muse is not quite as great as anyone, including the band, would like to think.
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totally agree with you here