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I love the instrumental for that part, my main problem with the vocal effect thing is that it’s just doing the song title stutter/repeat thing we’ve already seen in Madness and, even closer, Unsustainable. Just kinda feels like a...cheap hook, if that makes sense? Especially given how similarly they’ve already used it.

 

It’s a negative I can probs get over if I like the rest of the song as much as everything else in that wee clip, but still. Ye’d rather not have it, innit.

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TC doesn't deserve to be more than 2:00 tbh.

 

I'd say Pressure is pushing it at 3.00 as well to be honest. It's an okay song, but I'm so bored by the end of it because it just keeps repeating the same thing.

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i'm not sure i like the slow burn approach of this album release.

 

sorta like the dichotomy of watching an episode of a tv show week-to-week vs. the pleasure of binge-watching a favoured season series in one fell swoop.

 

i've got more random opinions that fit well in this post/thread, but Imma save 'em for some later time and place.

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I love the instrumental for that part, my main problem with the vocal effect thing is that it’s just doing the song title stutter/repeat thing we’ve already seen in Madness and, even closer, Unsustainable. Just kinda feels like a...cheap hook, if that makes sense? Especially given how similarly they’ve already used it.

 

It’s a negative I can probs get over if I like the rest of the song as much as everything else in that wee clip, but still. Ye’d rather not have it, innit.

 

Are we "mind brothers", by chance?

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Anyone compare this to the thing we heard on Zane Lowe? I don't remember much of it but I feel like this verse might be similar.

 

Just did and I originally really doubted it but...y’know what? It could just be. The beats sound kinda close to me. Tried working out the keys to see if they match but there’s too much talking in the Zane one for me to get it, they share similar root notes and progressions at points from what I can make out though. The leaked clip does sound a lot ‘deeper/fatter’ than the Zane instrumental, but obvs a song can transition between parts (and the quality isn’t great). Would rather get second opinions, here’s the two together:

 

https://picosong.com/w5WmW/

 

https://vocaroo.com/i/s1iYRVP7lskb

 

Are we "mind brothers", by chance?

 

Nah I just spit bare truth, this feeling is common

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If they are the same song I have a feeling the leaked audio we’re hearing pre-chorus and chorus (propapropa bit)

 

Hell even if it’s not the same song I think that is the case. The verse could be totally different than what we’ve heard. But I like this already.

 

Also tentative lyrics:

 

“You make me offers that I can’t refuse. You can tell me dirty lies. Something something truth. And when/then you kill me with your propapropapropa.”

Edited by Citizen_Eraser
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I'd say Pressure is pushing it at 3.00 as well to be honest. It's an okay song, but I'm so bored by the end of it because it just keeps repeating the same thing.

 

Pressure's last chorus is boring and unnessarary. Could've just gone into an instrumental chorus with more emphasis on the riff and it would've been better.

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Oh man, I kind of love that. I love the sludgy, stompy, tribal feel and the ridiculously OTT robo voice. The little snippet of vocal you hear right at the end reminds me of the vocal delivery in Sign Of The Times. Dare I say it's also a bit NIN/Gary Numan even early nu-metal, sort of Hybrid Theory/Meteora vibe.

 

That chorus though sounds ripe for some srs beefing up live too.

 

I love it too. I just hope it keeps going somewhere interesting.

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Does anyone else feel that Dom has regressed a drummer in the last few years? It's almost as if they're using a drum machine half the time and Dom isn't bringing anything to the table. Remember how on "Screenager" he had the inspired idea to use bones, or his drum intro on "Map of the Problematique"? Where did it go?

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I think he's felt the music hasn't called for super complex parts for the past few albums. I think he's also decided to experiment with being a more minimalist player, hitting with more weight and precision but less often and in more straightforward patterns. He's proven he can play his butt off many times in the past, so perhaps he just feels he doesn't need to keep proving it unless it's truly called for.

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Saw a post on Instagram there's an interview with them in this weekend's Sunday Times Culture section if anyone fancies a peek at that.

 

EDIT: Its also been uploaded to the Times website if anyone has a subscription.

 

Transcript:

 

Twenty-odd years ago, when Muse emerged, their songs were concise — four minutes of hard indie rock with a big chorus. There was nothing to scare the horses in the excellent Plug in Baby or Time Is Running Out, but then in rode Knights of Cydonia (Bohemian Rhapsody for Morricone nuts) and a three-part symphony called Exogenesis — not to mention gigs with drones — and things got ridiculous.

 

“I can generally say,” says Matt Bellamy, their lead singer, who talks at a reckless pace, “that whenever we go to an operatic sphere and the lyrics get conspiratorial, spacey — well, that stuff gets slagged off.” Does he enjoy that, given that his music is about testing boundaries? “Nobody enjoys being slagged off,” he says, baffled to be asked. “But we have a complicated relationship with both our detractors and hardcore fans. Even they hate certain stuff. This love-and-hate thing is just something we’ve learnt to accept.”

 

I wonder if he and his bandmates, Chris Wolstenholme (bass) and Dom Howard (drums), who met at school in Devon, go into each album and guess which songs people will say “Oh, they’ve really done a Muse there” about. Bellamy laughs. A short, thin man in a red and black biker jacket, he is great company. Honest and humorous about his outlandish rock band (Spinal Tap for Radiohead fans), he has a pleasing self-awareness, despite being the sort of bloke you imagine will be hugely disappointed to go through his entire life without meeting an alien.

 

Muse’s new album, their eighth, is Simulation Theory. It is the simplest they have sounded for 15 years, with tracks such as Get Up and Fight and The Dark Side recalling the immediacy of their first records, a rush almost entirely absent on their 2015 outing, Drones. One song is military disco rock, another a lot like Prince. They are still the world’s least subtle band, with lyrics largely about humans as cogs, but this was a conscious effort, Howard says, to “trim fluff”, and the results only embellish the idea that Muse don’t so much fit into a genre as are one. It’s impressive to have that heft two decades in.

 

In an interview for their debut album, Showbiz, Bellamy said the substance of his lyrics — anguish, mostly — came from dealing with the death of relatives and his parents’ split. What, then, I ask this 40-year-old millionaire rock-star dad of one who lives in LA, is the substance behind Simulation Theory? “It’s almost a wonderful lack of substance!” he says, bursting out laughing and continuing to cackle. At one point in the interview, he turns down a second cup of coffee because “I’ll get all jittery”. Bloody hell.

 

Anyway, the “lack of substance” line was only half a joke, given that, during the making of Simulation Theory, he not only bought a VR headset to play games with, but went to Nevada’s festival of nudity and niceness, Burning Man, four times. “It’s the feeling,” he continues, far more seriously, “of reacting to the political landscape and realising I don’t really want to know about the world any more. It’s about wanting to escape. It’s a desire to find the fun and the point in my own brain when I was a child, and things just seemed wonderful and easy.”

 

What in particular is he trying to retreat from? “The inability to find common ground,” he says. “When you switch on the news, you see people arguing all the time, and it’s a turn-off. People are retreating from engaging because it’s unpleasant. One of the political statements on the album is the fact that wanting to disengage with debate is becoming more attractive than engaging with debate.”

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Transcript part 2:

 

He says he prefers to play a Star Trek video game plugged into people all over the world, and his point, I guess, is that if we build up relationships from the ground, the future may be kinder. That is nice, but optimistic. Does he actually encourage disengagement from reality? “I don’t encourage disengagement for the sake of disengagement,” he says. “But I’d encourage people to remind themselves what it is to have fun with others that has nothing to do with tribal mentality.”

 

The problem with this positive vagueness is that Muse songs have a tendency to be co-opted by those they disagree with. Bellamy is a “left-leaning libertarian”, but a few years ago his strident anthem Uprising was picked up by the right-wing political pundit Glenn Beck for his own neocon purposes. Get Up and Fight could go the same way, despite being about Bellamy’s uncle’s cancer, but that is always a risk when a pop star challenges political thinking, yet doesn’t pin their colours to any actual political mast.

 

Couldn’t he be more specific? “I would never affiliate myself with any particular group,” Bellamy replies, as expected. “Fundamentally, I am against party politics. The concept of a party is a hijack of democracy.” What is the alternative? “Exactly. Do I have the alternative? I don’t know.” And from there he launches into a sort of economic wish list for Britain: how we must think of politics three-dimensionally; the Nolan Chart; oscillations; meta-modernism; abolition of the Lords; how “the concept of nature should be state-owned, activated via land value taxation”. Agree or not, you just don’t get this from the Kooks.

 

Does he vote? “Yes, but I vote for the underdogs,” he says, smiling. “I’ll give you a clue — I tend to vote in the environmental direction.”

 

Dom Howard is dressed in scruffy black, with a semi-directional haircut. He is the sort of rock star who physically points when making a point, which is rather David Brent, but he’s a man clearly living his best life, and that enthusiasm is quite infectious. I ask if he ever understands what his old friend Bellamy is going on about. “I’ve got no idea!” he says, and I’m not sure how much he’s joking — but they are close, having grown up together in the weirdest job possible.

 

“What’s changed?” Howard asks of their move from the album Showbiz to actual showbiz. “We were naive, introverted kids. Self-conscious, figuring stuff out. We took everything too seriously and, in hindsight, life’s too short. We went into the second album needing to be a bit more elaborate, and since we opened that door, well...” He laughs. Their most recent album included one 10-minute song with a co-writing credit for Edward Elgar.

 

“I was in a darker space back then,” Bellamy says of their breakthrough. “Then I went through some violent, quick changes — because, during the touring of the second album, I had to meet strangers all the time, and people would tell you they hate you or love you. You have to find yourself in that somehow, and confront thousands of people expecting you to be great all the time on stage. It was sink or swim and I managed to stay afloat, basically.”

 

Live, Muse are loud, terrific and undeniable: three men and a lot of special effects wowing stadiums worldwide. When I saw them in 2007, at the new Wembley, it was a blast, and the show has only got more complex since. Bellamy says there is something addictive about trying new things, and that is why Muse in 2018 are nothing like the moping indie heroes — Sonic Youth, Ned’s Atomic Dustbin, the Wedding Present — they worshipped in 1998.

 

When, I ask, was the turning point to this extremity? “It was gradual,” he says. Wembley, he argues, was absurd to them, then they got hooked on finding the limit. They originally aimed for sweaty clubs and sweaty vibes, but once you’ve pranced around a stadium in an LED suit on building-sized bright pillars, it’s hard to go back to playing Plymouth Uni.

 

It seems funny, perhaps, when Bellamy tells me that he stays hidden in the background on family occasions, and that he never really wanted to be a rock star, but Devon didn’t have many singers, so he had little choice. What’s left to do? He shakes his head at the idea of the absolutely unexpected: an acoustic record. “I’d love to play the Egyptian pyramids, though,” he says. “That would be interesting.”

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“It’s the feeling,” he continues, far more seriously, “of reacting to the political landscape and realising I don’t really want to know about the world any more. It’s about wanting to escape. It’s a desire to find the fun and the point in my own brain when I was a child, and things just seemed wonderful and easy.”

 

I feel this.

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