LP9: WOTP Discussion/Speculation Thread

[muse samuse]

Some song descriptions from Blood Records UK which has just released a limited vinyl Zoetrope edition of WOTP:

With Muse being Muse, there is NO bowing to any singular genre.  The album’s title track “Will Of The People” brings playful provocation to a dystopian glam-rocker while there is an innocence and a purity to the nostalgic electronic textures of “Verona.” From the visceral thrill of “Won’t Stand Down,” to the industrial-tinged, granite heavy riffs of “Kill Or Be Killed,” or the lightning-bolt rush of “Euphoria,” the album concludes with the frenetic finale of the brutally honest “We Are Fucking Fucked.”  

The Halloween track has also been described as 'spooky synth-rock' in another advance review.

[Hat]

12 hours ago, muse samuse said:

Some song descriptions from Blood Records UK which has just released a limited vinyl Zoetrope edition of WOTP:

With Muse being Muse, there is NO bowing to any singular genre.  The album’s title track “Will Of The People” brings playful provocation to a dystopian glam-rocker while there is an innocence and a purity to the nostalgic electronic textures of “Verona.” From the visceral thrill of “Won’t Stand Down,” to the industrial-tinged, granite heavy riffs of “Kill Or Be Killed,” or the lightning-bolt rush of “Euphoria,” the album concludes with the frenetic finale of the brutally honest “We Are Fucking Fucked.”  

The Halloween track has also been described as 'spooky synth-rock' in another advance review.

That's from a press release from back in March: https://themusicuniverse.com/muse-announces-will-people/

[muse samuse]

Duly noted above.

Matt's apt and witty description of the title track repeated below for its brilliance:

“’Will of the People’ is a fictional story set in a fictional metaverse on a fictional planet ruled by a fictional authoritarian state run by a fictional algorithm manifested by a fictional data centre running a fictional bank printing a fictional currency controlling a fictional population occupying a fictional city containing a fictional apartment where a fictional man woke up one day and thought “fuck this.””
 

[Silentgod86]

On 7/26/2022 at 7:38 AM, Clunge said:

I much rather bands didn't attempt to capture the studio version/sound live – that's not why I go to gigs. The studio lets you do anything, layer it up with 80 different takes and embellishments, that's fine – that's the point of being in the studio, even more so these days when you can just add infinite tracks in ProTools and don't have to worry about bouncing things down like The Beatles did.

Live should then be about making that work live, not 100% faithfully recreating it. Pare it all back to the core components of the song. Get extra musicians in if you want / need, but the last thing I want are robotic recreations of studio versions. The perfect example being how Matt used to (perhaps still does) uses a backing track for the harmonics in the Stockholm Syndrome intro. It's just complete unnecessary. Same as when Chris used a backing track for the Time Is Running Out bassline (yes, I know he plays over the top of it, but he's since proved it wasn't necessary in the first place).

Also, Muse's songs really aren't all that complex or technical – either to actually play or recreate sonically. It's why I still find the rigidity of their sets quite irritating. Songs like Muscle Museum, Uno, Hyper Music, Dead Star, MK Ultra, The Handler, Reapers, etc, could easily be rotated in and out without issue is they thrashed them out in a rehearsal room on tour for an hour or so. Metallica manage this and their songs are infinitely more complex. Radiohead typically rehearse 60-70 songs per tour and rotate most of them. Pearl Jam's setlists are bananas. Pixies often manage 40 songs in a single set, more than Muse might rotate in four or five years. The Cure sometimes manage nearly that. Horses for courses perhaps, but Muse don't have a lot of excuses here.

Very much agree with this sentiment. If you listen to the bootlegs between 1999 and 2002, there's an incredible variety in how songs were played and ad libing sections of songs was common. The slide towards replicating the sound of the album live started in 2003 with absolution (more synth tracks than OoS or Showbiz) and pretty much crystallised by the  Resistance era. Since, there's been little joy in listening to the live versions unless the gig was particularly good.

[Dysfunco]

^Also playing to backing tracks means a fixed tempo, which takes away the point with playing live in some regards IMO.
It's not as dynamic and lively, that way.

If I were in a band at this level, I certainly wouldn't want to play to a "click" in live situations too... (apart from some rare cases where there would be no good workaround, obviously)

Edited July 31, 2022 by Dysfunco

[hendosyndrome]

On 7/26/2022 at 7:38 AM, Clunge said:

I much rather bands didn't attempt to capture the studio version/sound live – that's not why I go to gigs. The studio lets you do anything, layer it up with 80 different takes and embellishments, that's fine – that's the point of being in the studio, even more so these days when you can just add infinite tracks in ProTools and don't have to worry about bouncing things down like The Beatles did.

Live should then be about making that work live, not 100% faithfully recreating it. Pare it all back to the core components of the song. Get extra musicians in if you want / need, but the last thing I want are robotic recreations of studio versions. The perfect example being how Matt used to (perhaps still does) uses a backing track for the harmonics in the Stockholm Syndrome intro. It's just complete unnecessary. Same as when Chris used a backing track for the Time Is Running Out bassline (yes, I know he plays over the top of it, but he's since proved it wasn't necessary in the first place).

Also, Muse's songs really aren't all that complex or technical – either to actually play or recreate sonically. It's why I still find the rigidity of their sets quite irritating. Songs like Muscle Museum, Uno, Hyper Music, Dead Star, MK Ultra, The Handler, Reapers, etc, could easily be rotated in and out without issue is they thrashed them out in a rehearsal room on tour for an hour or so. Metallica manage this and their songs are infinitely more complex. Radiohead typically rehearse 60-70 songs per tour and rotate most of them. Pearl Jam's setlists are bananas. Pixies often manage 40 songs in a single set, more than Muse might rotate in four or five years. The Cure sometimes manage nearly that. Horses for courses perhaps, but Muse don't have a lot of excuses here.

While I understand the sentiment of frustration around rigidity of set lists, the production setup of the bands mentioned is very different. Marc Carolan (MUSE FOH engineer) has a few videos explaining his live setup - the layers of automation across his mixes, their integration with the visual setup is entirely different to how a band like Pearl Jam or Pixies are set up, so swapping songs in and out isn't as easy as rearranging a setlist.

I'd love to see them play more varied sets but sadly, they're not geared that way.

[kueller]

I miss the golden age of this forum when people were active and tokens were fungible.

[Claudia O]

What is this NFT stuff all about .. I just don‘t care about them, would never buy them .. 

https://www.theguardian.com/music/muse

Edited August 1, 2022 by Claudia O

[Hypermused]

On 7/30/2022 at 5:56 PM, Silentgod86 said:

Very much agree with this sentiment. If you listen to the bootlegs between 1999 and 2002, there's an incredible variety in how songs were played and ad libing sections of songs was common. The slide towards replicating the sound of the album live started in 2003 with absolution (more synth tracks than OoS or Showbiz) and pretty much crystallised by the  Resistance era. Since, there's been little joy in listening to the live versions unless the gig was particularly good.

I'd say it’s unrealistic to hark back to when they were in their early 20s, playing much smaller gigs and off the back of two gritty three-piece-sounding albums, when you consider they’re about to release their 9th album and how they want their live shows to be with all sorts of new technology. They've certainly come a long way since silhouettes and big balloons on Hullabaloo 😆.

The awesome loose-adlib early stuff usually came from Matt anyway. Chris n Dom were so solid together, it left Matt to be free - eg New Born solos 2001 - 2006 or screaming or just doing whatever he wanted for a verse or two. Now Matt has sooo much to do on each song and at the high level he sets for himself. He doesn’t get anywhere near enough credit! The vocals alone (try and sing one full concert, never mind night after night) with complicated vocal lines, a lot of tricky guitar/piano work and songs crafted in such a way they don’t really lend themselves for any space to go mental. Oh and by the way, they’re playing to tens of thousands every night in stadiums and festivals with all sorts of technical logistics. You’d want as little to go wrong as possible and I certainly wouldn’t want to be at the gig where it went wrong ‘that time’, especially at recent ticket prices!

Don’t forget things like the Pscyho tour - it was awesome. I don’t know if you guys were able to go to that but you could tell that was for us pwoper fans, no n00bs allowed! They didn’t have to do that. In Manchester they played Hyper Music, The Groove, Dead Star and Fury and I got a pic with Matt outside after the show. Those nights are much more ‘special’ than throwing a random oldie which may not fit the theme of the new tour. They can do small stuff like whenever they want and probably will again, like they did in Exeter. So I can forgive click tracks and solid performances during the main tour for stuff like that.

Edited August 2, 2022 by Hypermused

[That Little Animal]

 

On 8/1/2022 at 9:35 PM, Claudia O said:

What is this NFT stuff all about .. I just don‘t care about them, would never buy them .. 

https://www.theguardian.com/music/muse

People can explain them to me a million times, and I might finally grasp what NFTs are, but I’ll never understand why they exist or what purpose they serve. 

Edited August 2, 2022 by That Little Animal

[Silentgod86]

1 hour ago, That Little Animal said:

 

People can explain them to me a million times, and I might finally grasp what NFTs are, but I’ll never understand why they exist or what purpose they serve. 

Because they neither exist or serve any purpose, so I think you're alright.

[kueller]

On 8/2/2022 at 9:13 AM, That Little Animal said:

People can explain them to me a million times, and I might finally grasp what NFTs are, but I’ll never understand why they exist or what purpose they serve. 

With cryptocurrency having become one big volatile speculation market everything new that comes from it can be read as another way for people to get money off of it and anything else is intentional or self-convinced justification of the primary motive.

[Silentgod86]

Looks like the press tour is starting, Guardian Interview here which effectively confirms that Ghosts was mostly like retitled from the Great Reset. Interesting interview though, nice to see some reconciliation between what Matt used to say and what he believes in these days.

[That Little Animal]

31 minutes ago, Silentgod86 said:

Looks like the press tour is starting, Guardian Interview here which effectively confirms that Ghosts was mostly like retitled from the Great Reset. Interesting interview though, nice to see some reconciliation between what Matt used to say and what he believes in these days.

I wonder if Matt is volunteering all this info about his evolving viewpoints because he wants to clear the record, or if he’s asked about it because of the album’s political themes. 
 

‘The Great Reset’ sounds like it was an attempt at bait and switch trolling, since it’s a song about losing loved ones to Covid. Good thing he changed it though, it would have never landed. 

[Silentgod86]

I think it's a consequence of Matt's persona in the Naughts  was all about the conspiracy theories. Back then, you could just attribute them to Matt being a bit weird and cookie. Weird, misguided but ultimately harmless back then (admittedly I do know some who has dramatically for the worse by the same conspiracies). But when you look at it today, you see the alt right use conspiracy to prey on people's fears and to channel it into culture wars and direct physical action against people and institutions, it has becomes dangerous and volatile. 

It's nice to see Matt admit he was wrong and was a bit of an idiot. We could all do with with humility and reflecting on our past actions from time to time.

[Claudia O]

3 weeks guys ! 3 weeks to go! 🥳🥳
 

I hope the Muse-shop delivers my order in time! Has someone experience with it?

Edited August 6, 2022 by Claudia O

[Anticitizen1]

Well if I cast my mind back to the Drones box set, it was a few days late. Simulation Theory cd was also day or so after release...

Guess that's the price you pay for any pre-order bonuses. I'm sure some will have had no problems and some will have had worse stories. Still, here's hoping...

6 hours ago, Claudia O said:

3 weeks guys ! 3 weeks to go! 🥳🥳
 

I hope the Muse-shop delivers my order in time! Has someone experience with it?

 

[Claudia O]

Thanks.. 3 days early would be great 🤪 

[MartianSpaghettiRider]

I found that KOBK chorus is quite similar to the one of The Killing Moon by Echo & The Bunnymen: both starts with the word “fate” and their chord progression is nearly identical (with The Killing Moon being slightly longer). 
 

Try and listen yourself: 

 

[Claudia O]

Hm.. slightly similar maybe, but not enough for a court action 😜 

[MartianSpaghettiRider]

1 hour ago, Claudia O said:

Hm.. slightly similar maybe, but not enough for a court action 😜 

That… wasn’t my point in fact. 😕

I just wanted to point out how pleasantly similar they sound. It’s almost like an unintended homage to Echo & The Bunnymen.

[Claudia O]

I was joking … 

I don‘t like that song, sorry.

[Silentgod86]

On 6/4/2022 at 11:42 PM, Silentgod86 said:

KOBK = Assassin + The Killing Moon

 

[Claudia O]

9 days !! 

Edited August 17, 2022 by Claudia O

[Citizen_Eraser]

Photos of physical copies in people's hands are starting to show up online. It's imminent guys.

It's midnight where I live and I'm probably going to stay up another 3-4 hours at least hoping for something to break. Even though I kind of need to sleep for something tomorrow morning lol. Too much hype.