It’s worth noting that before Muse coalesced into their current form
a decade and a half ago, the core trio —
singer-multi-instrumentalist Matthew Bellamy, bassist Christopher
Wolstenholme, drummer Dominic Howard — pretended to be a glam
band to enter a battle of the bands. There’s a surplus of glaminess on
Muse’s fifth album, The Resistance, but it’s further evidence of
the band’s amazing facility for musical mimicry. “Uprising,” swings
with electro-pop urgency, features a slinky synth line lifted straight
from Doctor Who and swells with classic-rock anthemics and
orchestral bombast. “Undisclosed Desires” rages with Queensryche guitar
riffage and Bellamy’s soaring falsetto, while “United States of
Eurasia/Collateral Damage” shimmers like Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody”
and Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir” synthesized by Rufus Wainwright for a
massively scaled rock opera. Speaking of opera, Muse finish The
Resistance with the 13-minute, three-movement “Exogenesis:
Symphony,” an ambitious and movingly successful suite that fuses all of
the trio’s longstanding loves — electronica, prog,
classical — into an orchestral rock triumph. Not so
coincidentally, the piece’s second part is sub-titled “Cross
Pollination.” — Brian Baker
This article appears in Sep 16-22, 2009.
