Daveportivo's Cultural Evaluation Facility

I have to give it to Matt Bellamy and co they really are shrewd business men. Throwing out Uprising as the first proper single from this record was a masterstroke. With it's glam rock meets indie death disco stomp, it grabs the attention, it feels like the natural succesor to Supermassive Black Hole and will get indie kids across the nations grooving to their doctor who meets Daft Punk beats. It's a brilliant distraction, as Uprising is everything that The Resistance is not. Firstly, it's hell of alot of fun, secondly, it's unpretentious, it has that ironic wink and a nod that makes Muse great. Matt Bellamy wails predictably about "Fat Cats" and evil governments, but the disco glam defuses his overly simplicistic and grating sloganeering. Black Holes And Revelations left Muse and awkward conumdrum of where to go next? They couldn't regress, they didn't seem comfortably shifting dirrections so their solution was to take over the reigns of production and make their sound bigger, and stretch it to the nth degree. Unfortunately rather than creating Muse's magnus opus they have instead created a hideous, bloated, beast, that serves to highlight Muse's limmitations rather than acentuate their strenghts.

The self production has done Muse absolutely no favours, Resistance is an album screaming out for an editor, for someone to put the breaks on Muse's ambition, someone to say "hang on guys this isn't a great idea". As a result the worst whims of Muse's previous work have resurfaced, but they've been flung forward to front and centre stage with horrendous results. Matt Bellamy's wide screen whining is all over this record, but it is totally devoid of charm, and replaced in spades by pretention. The great success of Black Holes... was that it counter balenced excess with accesibility, on The Resistance it's all excess, it's the sound of Muse making music to amuse themselves. As a results we are treated to ballads so painful they'll have you scrathing out your eyeballs just to distract from the torture your ears are undergoing. I'm sure most readers are familar with the horrid United States Of Eurasia. A failed attempted to blend Western and Eastern strings and classical influences into a Queen sized stadium epic. It has potential it feels like the start to a really great Muse track but instead of kicking in with that killer hook, or that stadium sized riff, it just keeps of wailing and whining and is sunk beneath the weight of it's own pretentions. Unfortunately it's followed by Guiding Light the first ten seconds of which are brilliant, the heavy robotic thud of the drums had me thinking "holy fuck, have Depeche Mode got a hold of John Carpenter Soundtrack?". Sadly not, it's another ballad in the style of Invincible, this song more than any other feels like a rehash, but even a rehash of a Muse track should be fun right? Well wrong, this is just one long drawn out yawn. Sure the guitars are stadium sized, but if the Darkness even thought about unleashing a riff like that we'd jump all over them.

I'm going to lay off Matt Bellamy for a little while, because seriously I could write for weeks on end about his whine or his cringe inducing lyrics (I promise we will get round to those), but it's time to talk about how endebted this record feels. Listing the influences could go on forever, from Bach via Queen to Daft Punk and Adam and the Ants, everything on this record, especially structurally sounds borrowed. It feels as though Muse have run wild with copy and paste and created their own little musical scrap book. Take a look at Undisclosed Desires, it sounds like Muse have taken a passing interest in Timbaland creating a beat that would have sounded dated in 2007, and then combined it with some of the least subtle Thom Yorke nods in human history, while some how managing to yet again pillage Depeche Mode (seriously I hope there getting royalties for this stuff). It's not without it's thrills but these tracks feel so bloated and unispired.

A perfect example of the later is Unnatural Selection a track that is simply too long. It starts with a glorious bouncy bombastic riff, it has a ridiculously over the top vocal hook and the track concludes superbly. It borrows from Metallica, System and Queen but who cares it's insane fun right, but oh no, they just had to kill our joy, by dropping the beat into an unholy mid track whineathon. Had this breakdown, been fresh or inventive, it might be commendable, but it just feels tired and tacked on. That said Unnatural Selection minor quibbles or not is still one of the stand out tracks on the album, even if it does feel like a chore. Just imagine if they had roped in a producer with a mind of his own, to trim this track down, even by just a minute, we could have been looking at one of the all time greatest Muse tracks, as is, it's a good but bloated track on a hideous bloated album.

Okay it's time to look at Matt's vocals. They've always been a tricky subject to broach. It's a real case of the sublime and the ridiculous. Written down on paper they always seem horrid, but it's really a matter of context, sometimes his vocals soar majestically, and sometimes they grate morosely. Matt Bellamy has always been wailing like a stoned first year at university, with a inflated sense of his own importance. Some times this means he's prone to right these wonderfully apocalyptic and idealistic soundbytes and sometimes he'll sound like a broken record whining away without subtly or substance. On Resistance it's a little from column A and a little from column B;

"Is Your Secret Safe Tonight,

Luckily Resistance is one of the albums most fun tracks and a potential monster should it be released as a single with it's uber hook "Love Is Our Resistance". It feels like a gloriously silly sci fi stamped statement of intent with a healthly slab of Kate Bush and Queen thrown into the mix. Intellectual it ain't but it sure is a hell of alot of fun, and it's a sense of fun that is desperately absent throughout the rest of The Resistance. Contrasted to I Belong To You a track with real promise that is completely overwhelmed by some of the most horrendous lyricism and a truely horrid arrangement. It looks like Matt Bellamy was aiming for a night at the opera but ended up with ammatuer hour at the student union. The album then closes with the Exogensis three part symphony, which is a real take it or leave it moment. It's either all of Muse's excess at its worse, or it's a hell yeah OTT Fuck the world moment. It's certain to drive away as many as it enthralls.

The Resistance is not without merit, Uprising and Resistance are an absolutely blast to start the record and their are glimmers of great ideas here and there, with Unnatural Selection not falling far short of brilliance. But all in all it's a bloated record, it's all the worst excesses of Muse run a muck, and at worst it's boring and predictable, it may not be the sound you expect but the song structures and arrangements rarely thrill, every inch of this album feels, endebt, cliche and on occasion embarssing. Ultimately this is an album that needed a top of the line producer to help craft and shape, to take all the ideas, influences and flashes of brilliance and help guide them into a wonderous concise whole, rather than a bloated excerise in self enggrandizement, largely devoid of humour and derilict of charm. Fear not, after all this is a Muse record and even a bad Muse record is better and more interesting than most, but make absolutely no mistake, this is a bad Muse record. There's hearts are in the right place but it's time to screw their collective heads back on and return to the drawing board.