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Orpheus3

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Posts posted by Orpheus3

    Drones Album Discussion Thread

    in Songs & Releases

    Posted

    Another problem with this album (and Muse generally post Absolution) is that they seem to have lost the ability to make genuinely dark and chilling songs.

     

    And this time they seemed to suggest those songs were back. Fairly sure it came up in the interviews all the time before Drones was released about how it was going to be about abandonment, despair and rage against the system, before the eventual defection, etc. blah blah blah. Then we got all the track names - "Dead Inside", "Psycho", "Mercy", "The Handler", "Revolt" - and they backed that up.

     

    And then the songs come out and there's no depth to them whatsoever. Dead Inside is almost poppy, with kinda corny lyrics in places (as discussed). Psycho's chorus is "your ass belongs to me now". The less said about Mercy the better (but "tell me why the men in cloaks always have to bring me down!!" - those darn men in cloaks, eh?). Reapers ("babe") and The Handler are sort of saved by their heaviness, and the post-chorus vocal thing in The Hander is the closest Muse come to sounding a little unsettling (not sure that's the right word, but anyway) on the album. But then Defector is just Queenish and Revolt sounds like something out of a cheesy musical, and both have utterly vapid lyrics.

     

    Drones ends up being equivalent - musically and lyrically - of what I imagine a Michael Bay movie about warfare would be. All big bangs and no subtlety and no emotional heft whatsoever.

     

    But they used to be able to do this stuff properly! The erosive atmosphere of Hyper Chondriac Music, the taut claustrophobia of Dead Star (or Hysteria), the eeriness of Ruled by Secrecy, etc. It's a shame that it's been gone for a long time.

     

    TL;DR, what happened to creepy Muse

     

    This. All of this. Something worked when the scope, at least lyrically, was deeply personal. The arch, titanic clash of histrionic emotion gave a super-hereoan feel to mundane wounds. Muse took universal human pains and rocketed them up into Greek Myth.

     

    But then they start to make political statements and just get unbearably lazy. The idea make sense on paper, but it seems like they couldn't decide between an artistic statement or a fun heavy riff. They knew they'd make money. They've gotten deeply, deeply lazy.

    Drones Album Discussion Thread

    in Songs & Releases

    Posted

    Muse, a group whose music was formative and dear to me, have become an awful and ridiculous joke of a band. Drones is one of the worst records I've ever heard, and would have done much better as a well argued anthology of essays on modern violence, injustice, and criminal dehumanization via the Empire, broadly defined.

     

    The whole mechanism of Muse's music is the mythic grandiosity they give to human emotion. Heartbreak becomes worlds exploding. An anxiety attack becomes an alien invasion. A guitar becomes a weapon of righteous and divine light. F*** yeah. I feel that. All of humanity feels that. Thats why Ovid, Homer, the Genesis narrative, the Epic of Gilgamesh. That stuff was pop back in the day. It makes sense that a rock band would key into these themes and mythicize them so viscerally. After all... Wikipedia did/does define Muse as "space rock", so the Cosmos have some bearing.

     

    For me, Drones fails--at what could have been a subtle and masterful allegory between an increasingly objectivizing and controlling relationship and the ever more absurd reality of the citizen of the Empire--because of 1) the lack of ingenuity and invention or even a sense of life in the music (it is, maybe on purpose, Dead Inside) and 2) its deeply uncreative and hamfisted conceptual approach on the lyrical front.

     

    If Muse want a revolution, they've done nothing to engender it. The upheaval and anarchism is polished into toothless, top-shop sloganeering by Mutt Lange and the band's own increasingly nausea-inducing tendencies toward butt rock. They've embraced their corporatism. They are a money machine and they know it.

     

    Maybe im particularly upset because the ideas at the core of most of Muse' music are things I agree with: Caesar is a brutish gangster mascarading as a messiah. Hail Caesar.

     

     

    I keep hoping that there's this genius behind it, some archly meta reading of this album, either distilled on purpose by Matthew Bellamy or somehow wrought through his fame-addled brain by the Hand of God... Perhaps Drones is an art piece about how the State can co-opt and defang revolutionary sentiments and pitch them back at the public, so the people feel all the righteousness of uprising and resistance, but still go back to their imperial, tax-paying, murder-funding lives. They wear N.W.A. T-shirts to their cushy, bourgeois desk jobs.

    Panem et Circum.

    Share your controversial Muse opinions II - More Radiohead talk

    in Other Muse Topics

    Posted

    Muse came to Tampa Bay, Florida.

     

    I took my 17 year-old brother, who also knows every word to every song. We were the only real fans in the stands I think.

     

    Point is, the show, at the time was great... but then I realized this.

     

    Matthew Bellamy looks like he's fucking bored with his own music.

     

    They played New Born with almost no enthusiasm. There was little to no excited improvisation and riffing. Just note for note replications of the record.

     

    Has being a father sapped of his energy? Does he even like being a dad? Does he even like Kate?

     

    I think he's having an almost mid-life crisis, honestly. This used to be the psychotic bastard who only back in 2006 did his crazed WAAAAA YA YA YAOOOW war cry during HAARP's Time is Running Out. He used to shuffle dance. He used to babble on about weird shit.

     

    Matt... where the fuck are you? You are not the 6th member of Take That.

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