Songs like “Dig Down,” “Something Human,” and “Thought Contagion,” were catchy, but they did not feel like traditional Muse and were nothing special. With each single they dropped leading up to the album’s release date, it was clear they were going to deviate even more from their usual sound. But, I decided to give their latest release, Simulation Theory, a listen. I skipped their last two releases, Drones and The 2nd Law, since I didn’t hear great things about them. However, since 2012, Muse fans have been conflicted with their recent change in sound and direction. From Matt Bellamy’s fantastic vocal range to their lavish instrumentation, Muse quickly became the band of my summer. I started with their 2001 album Origin of Symmetry and immediately fell in love. My friends recommended that one of the bands I listened to should be Muse, since I only knew a song or two from them. This past summer, I decided to listen to bands and music that I was unfamiliar with.
Or Algorithm, with its none-more-jackbooted synth bass line, urgent strings, and Bellamy emoting about how “algorithms evolve / Push aside / Render us obsolete / This means war.” That’s when you feel yourself seized by an unaccountable desire to march through the streets waving a massive flag, warning your neighbours that the robots are coming to kill us all.Matt Bellamy and Dominic Howard from Muse at the 2016 Grammy’s. Propaganda sounds like Muse are trying to be Prince, which isn’t entirely convincing, while Get Up and Fight bolts on a power ballad chorus to an elegantly restrained verse.īut it’s still the less poppy moments that are most exciting: the cascading arpeggios of Blockades, giving way to furious power chords. New producers are on board, among them Shellback and Timbaland, charged with finding a new face to Muse. So Simulation Theory comes trailed as Muse’s synthpop album (it’s not), heavily inspired by the 80s (well, in its cover art less so in much of the music). After all, there are probably only so many times you can record wildly overblown songs about your pathological dread of the power structures of a future world without wondering whether it’s a fit pastime for an adult. Which, naturally, is the point at which he chose to trail Muse’s eighth album with the most conventional rock-star gripe of all, on Something Human, a partially acoustic, countryish lope about how hard the life of the touring rock star is: “10,000 miles left on the road / 500 hours until I am home / I need something human.” No, Matt! Bring back the drones and the robots and the alien overlords! You can, however, perhaps see why he felt Muse needed a change. Yes, we thought he’d been spending too much time on the outer edges of YouTube, but he looks a bit less peculiar in the age of Cambridge Analytica. After all, he’s spent much of Muse’s career warning us about technological conspiracies to take over the world.
P erhaps Matt Bellamy is the greatest thinker of our age.
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