Album Review: Absolution

Muse - Absolution (2003)

Muse is one of the rock-your-face-off bands from Britain that picked up the guitar mantle once Radiohead left it in their wake. They are rather HUGE in Britain and not quite as big here, though their song "Knights of Cydonia" (which is, incidentally, INCREDIBLE++) made it onto a Guitar Hero release, so even the uncool, non-Brit fans have heard of them. This album actually got them some of their first radioplay in the states, and it displays all of their strengths and weaknesses upfront. Muse is about theatrics, prog-rock virtuosity, big choruses, thrown down riffs and did I mention bombastic theatrics, and for me, the only one of those aspects that set them apart are those proggy fireworks. They have a tendency to fall into a sort of "Radiohead derivative" rut, and it helps not at all that their lead singer sounds a whole lot like Thom Yorke (the lead singer of Radiohead, for the uninitiated). This album succeeds when it gets riff crazy and blows you away with blistering guitar lines; it fails with big piano chords and bombast and falsetto wailing over the top. Muse fans would deny this and fight me to the death, but I can't just help but think of a lot of this album as, sorry, rather bland Radiohead, and the disc, despite multiple spins, is pretty mundane as a whole and its songs are tough to differentiate. There are highlights (they're the singles) - "Time is Running Out" and "Hysteria" exemplify what's going on when it's going right - and plenty of movements within the song that get the heart pumping. But a lot of the album is an odd overwrought pastiche of disconnected musical passages, and I reiterate that the singing / importance of it all is just tiresome. I can't recommend this in good conscience, and I hope the other Muse albums are better, as when they smoke they SMOKE.

Status: Not Recommended
Nyet's Fave: "Hysteria"