Guest Blogger: Cait M2

Out of the many genre’s and music artists I’ve listened to over the years I would say with certainty that Muse is in my top 5 favorites. The alternative space-rock trio rose to fame in early 2001 and ever since they have sold out concerts, won awards, and made into many movie soundtracks. I remember the first song I heard from Muse was “Time Is Running Out”. The lyrics spoke of a love so great and so destructive that the singer couldn’t hold it back. When the lyrics were melded with the alternative-rock sound and the haunting baroque sound similar to Queen, I knew I stumbled across something big. After listening to their other albums, I really appreciated the different emotions and sounds they put into each song and they could create such a wide range of emotion with the same heavy-rock or space-rock sounds. Muse’s hit song “Apocalypse Please” from their album Absolution is a grandiose song that tries to send the listener a message of a comic book tragedy with dramatic piano and loud drums. Although most fans and critics gave the album good ratings, one critic thought it a bit too dramatic. “Absolution is a tad cheesy, a bit too grandiose in its ambitions, bursting at the seams with too many ideas, and thus exactly what any Muse fan craves.” I would agree that one of the main reasons why listeners like Muse is because it’s got so much going on in each song, but I wouldn’t say that makes it cheesy at all. In their fourth album Black Holes and Revelations, Muse lived up to their name by creating yet another hit single that differed from their other songs: “Knights of Cydonia.” This song is a strange combination of space and western with lyrics about a wanted fugitive in his ‘final shootout’ with the good guy. One reoccurring throughout all of this is the lead singer Matthew Bellamy. His emotional intensity and falsetto pieces are one of the things that make their music so good, but many critics say that he’s just a copy of Thom Yorke; lead singer of Radiohead. Although he cited Radiohead as one of his influences, his vocal range never goes down as far as Yorke’s in his music and of course each artist has their own personal signature. Overall I would say that Muse is a band that is worth the money and the time, the only album of theirs I wouldn’t buy is their most recent: The Resistance. They ventured a little out of what they usually do and created the 3 part “Exogenesis Symphony” and “Neutron Star Collision”, which I thought sounded pretentious and completely borrowed from other artists.