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Not only are the lyrics drastically worse than they used to be, but they're also usually more isolated from the music and in the forefront, rather than mixing in with the music.

 

Also, I think a major difference is that Matt's singing (even if the lyrics weren't great) used to carry so much more emotion along with the music. Nowadays almost every song seems devoid of genuine emotion. That's why The Handler still stands up as one of my favorite Muse songs, because it gives me that emotion that has been missing for so long now.

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I definitely agree with that. I'd also suggest the last minute or so of Dead Inside for that very same reason. Emotional delivery of the lines makes such a difference for me, and that's definitely something that's been lacking for a while, and makes whole songs or even albums feel rather insignificant. I was listening to Abso and Black Holes over the weekend actually, and like you say, even the songs where the lyrics aren't as good, you still feel like they mean something from the performance. Then when the lyrics are good, or the balance of the song is just right, it's so much better too. I actually think you take something like Aftermath as a recent example here too. A lot of people here don't like it, whether musically or lyrically, but I feel like the vocal performance actually matches the intended tone of the song pretty well. That makes it better overall for me. By contrast, I think that's why I never felt that connected to The Resistance, even though some of the songs are okay. The emotional delivery isn't there until Redemption.

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I definitely agree with that. I'd also suggest the last minute or so of Dead Inside for that very same reason. Emotional delivery of the lines makes such a difference.

 

Great example. I have some gripes with the final line ("On the outside, I'm the greatest guy but I'm dead inside" sounds straight out of those Facebook statuses that my bitterly single cousin always posts) but the way Matt sings it somehow manages to sell it for me. There's conviction in his voice.

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Great example. I have some gripes with the final line ("On the outside, I'm the greatest guy but I'm dead inside" sounds straight out of those Facebook statuses that my bitterly single cousin always posts) but the way Matt sings it somehow manages to sell it for me. There's conviction in his voice.

Yeah that's the main reason Dead Inside is probably my 2nd or 3rd favorite from Drones. I like that "I need you to see who I am" line, and "You taught me to lie."

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The 'Feel me now...' to '...now I've become just like you!' segment probably accounts for about half of what I like about that song to be honest. The emotional delivery in that part of the song really makes all the difference.

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But the ‘greatest guy / dead inside’ line is the key line in the whole song, if we’re to go with the Drones narrative. It’s the acceptance the protagonist has been reprogrammed. Tbh, I just love every single thing about Dead Inside. It’s stood up the best of any Drones track and it’s definitely in my top 10 Muse songs.

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But the ‘greatest guy / dead inside’ line is the key line in the whole song, if we’re to go with the Drones narrative. It’s the acceptance the protagonist has been reprogrammed. Tbh, I just love every single thing about Dead Inside. It’s stood up the best of any Drones track and it’s definitely in my top 10 Muse songs.

 

I agree.

 

I guess if you don't care at all about the narrative, it'd be a bad lyrics, but if you do, it fits perfectly.

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But the ‘greatest guy / dead inside’ line is the key line in the whole song, if we’re to go with the Drones narrative. It’s the acceptance the protagonist has been reprogrammed. Tbh, I just love every single thing about Dead Inside. It’s stood up the best of any Drones track and it’s definitely in my top 10 Muse songs.

 

Definitely! One of Muse's best pop rock efforts. It's a shame it didn't do as well as other singles like Madness or Starlight, but I guess that can't be helped as it is less accessible, kind of. But it's definitely up there for me. Also one of the few songs in which Matt sounds 100% sincere in the vocal delivery, I've always felt it was a very powerful tune.

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But the ‘greatest guy / dead inside’ line is the key line in the whole song, if we’re to go with the Drones narrative. It’s the acceptance the protagonist has been reprogrammed. Tbh, I just love every single thing about Dead Inside. It’s stood up the best of any Drones track and it’s definitely in my top 10 Muse songs.

 

I agree, that whole segment is fantastic, my sole gripe is the phrasing of "greatest guy" which is nit picky, no doubt. It doesn't make me like the song any less since I've never really listened to Muse for the lyrics anyways.

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There's not listening to Muse for the lyrics, and struggling to listen to Muse because of the lyrics.

And they've definitely moved into the latter category for me.

 

Bad lyrics are still part of the song, and I can't really just turn off the language centers of my brain to ignore them.

 

It is interesting though how my tolerance for shitty political/conspiracy stuff changed so abruptly.

It had been something I could look past for the longest time, like an old uncle telling uncomfortable stories at the holidays, but now it all just feels too real and dangerous, and I can't bring myself to just put up with it.

 

Haven't listened to Drones since at least September, and I really did love the album initially. :(

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Zedd ft. Matthew Bellamy

Really???

At the risk of sounding like an old fart, who's Zedd?

There's not listening to Muse for the lyrics, and struggling to listen to Muse because of the lyrics.

And they've definitely moved into the latter category for me.

 

Bad lyrics are still part of the song, and I can't really just turn off the language centers of my brain to ignore them.

 

It is interesting though how my tolerance for shitty political/conspiracy stuff changed so abruptly.

It had been something I could look past for the longest time, like an old uncle telling uncomfortable stories at the holidays, but now it all just feels too real and dangerous, and I can't bring myself to just put up with it.

 

Haven't listened to Drones since at least September, and I really did love the album initially. :(

I do wonder if part of that is down to knowing how the idea of conspiracy theories, or certain theories themselves, have been weaponised by some truly nasty fuckers to take away the credibility of their opposition, and which in turn seems to have a destabilising effect on the world around them.

 

I don't think Drones is that conspiracy heavy, mind. There's bits of it, but I'd say there are certain songs on the Absolution-BHAR-Resistance streak that talk about these constructs more than Drones reads.

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At the risk of sounding like an old fart, who's Zedd?

 

I do wonder if part of that is down to knowing how the idea of conspiracy theories, or certain theories themselves, have been weaponised by some truly nasty fuckers to take away the credibility of their opposition, and which in turn seems to have a destabilising effect on the world around them.

 

I don't think Drones is that conspiracy heavy, mind. There's bits of it, but I'd say there are certain songs on the Absolution-BHAR-Resistance streak that talk about these constructs more than Drones reads.

 

It never seemed as heavy handed on the pre-Resistance stuff, but maybe that's mostly nostalgia. Anger at the government in the face of the Iraq war wasn't misplaced, either.

It was mostly stuff Matt did and said that were a bit eyerolly, but were easier to just ignore when listening to the music.

It was also a time when it was a lot easier for me to just tolerate someone else's insane sounding beliefs, before things got really bad precisely because those types of people weren't taken seriously.

 

Resistance era stuff got really thick with it, but I disliked the album quite a bit in the first place, and thought the conspiracy stuff helped snuff all the emotion out of the material.

 

Drones somehow did a good job of being a semi-return to the earlier emotive stuff, while still having the immature "political" lyrics.

It just reminds me too much of all the bullshit going on in the world, much of which I don't have the luxury of just shutting my eyes to, and the tone of it sucks a lot of the enjoyment out of it now.

 

These two new songs, I just don't know. Even ignoring the rough lyrics, I just can't find anything to connect with in them at all.

I'd honestly struggle to come up with something that I thought was appealing in them.

Just so completely not my thing, I guess.

 

I also think the vocals in the verses of Thought Contagion are some of the worst Matt's done. Can't quite explain it, but he just sounds terrible to me. Not in a "his voice is going" sort of way, just in the delivery.

The most jarring and unappealing his voice has ever been to me.

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It never seemed as heavy handed on the pre-Resistance stuff

 

Definitely. Black Holes has plenty of kind of semi-political lyrics, but I always thought there was still enough detachment from the real world for it to not really matter, maybe because it was just of its time too, I suppose. I can listen to Assassin without thinking that Matt is really suggesting people go out and shoot their leaders down, and I don't need to take the lyrics of something like Exo-Politics seriously, while Take A Bow would actually work really well if it was released now.

 

I do agree that the climate's changed though and I think something of the abstract has been lost from their music as a combination of that and Matt's decreasingly subtle lyrics. There are songs like I Belong To You and Dig Down that I find unlistenable because the lyrics are just bad, but that's a different matter. Like you say, vague or ambiguous political lyrics about conspiracies and 'false beliefs' probably isn't the best thing to do right now. I find it quite off-putting anyway.

 

It depends on the song though, I guess. I don't mind the occasional song like MK Ultra because I don't really take it seriously, but then there's simpler stuff like Uprising that just feels like there's hardly any depth to it. Maybe it's because I prefer songs that don't really feel like they're referring to a particular time or any political situation, so the lyrics for me would be more abstract. Matt's talked about wanting to make timeless music recently, but unfortunately his lyrics are going the other way. They're becoming more and more derivative of whatever he thinks he's seeing on the news, which lyrically then usually puts me off any band.

Edited by Bs
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