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Oh and one more

- More experimenting with time signatures. Personally, my favourite moments of my other favourite artists like Tool and Pain of Salvation are usually stuff like this:

A timely reminder of why I really don't like PoS. That feels like abstract use of time signatures for literally no benefit at all, in so much as it would sound better standard.

 

I'm a huge fan of prog, of complex time signatures and so on, but only when they are used sparingly and effectively. Rush are the absolute best example of this. I find their music almost unlistenable because 90% of it would sound so much better if they weren't tripping over one too many or one too few beats, here and there.

 

Tool strike a pretty perfect balance for me, as do Radiohead.

 

Agreed on most of the other points though :yesey:.

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Fandango is actually a song that a lot of fans seem to think would sound better without the strange rhythm. Personally I didn't like it at all when I first heard it, but it has grown loads, especially the part I linked to where the rhythm changes and the melody really hits you.

 

But I wouldn't say it's a reason to dislike the band since they only have a handful of songs like that. I mean their worst album, Scarsick, is probably one of their most straightforward ones.

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There are many many many other reasons I dislike PoS tbh, I've just never been able to get into them at all. Same for Riverside as well.

 

My biggest issue with Muse post-Absolution is the flashes of utterly spectacular brilliance, but that are so fleeting.

 

Take A Bow, Map, City Of Delusion, MK Ultra, Reapers, Dead Inside, etc. That fine line between their core rock sound and then various electronics and orchestral influences. When they nail it, it's utterly brilliant. And then you have the Big Freezes, etc, littering the way...

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I'm confused, are you the same Clunge who claimed to love Remedy Lane and look forward to Scarsick back when it was about to be released? :LOL:

 

But yeah, Muse can really nail it, but then they just seem to want to release comedy songs as much as they want to release actual honest attempts? Like...why?

 

There's a reason why I rarely listen to the albums anymore and instead have made playlists where I just group together the songs from 2006-2015 that fit as a whole. A Synth-rock album, an orchestral rock album, and then just a cheesy album of leftovers. Strangely enough Muse's approach to be all over the place for four albums in a row can be mixed into three consistent albums.

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  • 5 months later...

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.

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I think you just have to remember taking muse's 'values'/lyrics at more than face value will end in disappointment. But then again I've never been one for lyrics. Riffs for days. And drones has a fair few that are great.

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Drones has good music and shitty lyrics

/topic

 

Pretty much. I really liked the album, although that might just be in comparison to the prior two it looked a lot better to me, but I was also infuriated with how asinine Psycho was (not to mention lazy musically) after what Matt had hyped it up to be. Maybe, ultimately, the rest of the album seemed amazing in comparison.

 

It IS pretty depressing to think that Matt might believe Drones is successful in conveying any of the politics or ideas that he says it was supposed to be about.

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I haven't listened to Drones in a few months but god damn. This album is a complete mess. Even Reapers and The Handler seemed boring to me and the lyrics were just terrible. I couldn't believe how bored I was during what was supposed to be their exciting rock album. Outside of Dead Inside, which I still quite like, I hated just about every second of this album. I really never thought they could get worse than T2L but I at least like more than one song on that album.

I think more than anything I was shocked by how much I used to like the album. I knew it had faults then but I think I was a little blind to how bad it was. Just...what the fuck?

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Yep. Pretty much. Drones might actually be my least favourite Muse album at this point. I've come to accept that even though The Resistance was kinda ruined by lifeless production, the album still had...5 really good songs and only one that was actually bad. Man, those were the days (I hate myself for saying it).

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