The bombastic use of guitar and drums, and the sinuous and powerful vocals of Singer Matt Bellamy are ever-present in tunes like “Supermassive Black Hole,” where there is a gravity and sexiness to a tale of women and their celestial nature.Īs a cohesive piece, Black Holes and Revelations is more ebb and flows as if offers a sense of urgency in the track “Assassin,” where there is a frantic-ness to the guitar riff accompanied by heart-pounding percussion. The album is a sort of Opera about a dystopian world, a journey through sounds and landscapes that entices, explores, and offers escape.
Muse has always held a somewhat specific place in Rock music. Often compared to Radiohead and never shying from the use of synthesizers and a more technological edge to their Progressive Hard Rock sound, the band produced more than just the expected in Black Holes and Revelations. With that in mind, there is more to this album than the sultry “Supermassive Black Hole,” and its place in Pop culture history as the song that played in Twilight while Edward Cullen, the tamest Vampire in literature and screen, participated in a thunderous game of baseball. Chances are, even the casual listener has heard at least one song from Black Holes and Revelations, unless they had been living under a rock. After being released on Jin the U.K. and followed by releases in the U.S., Australia, Taiwan, and Japan, the album has garnered plenty of praise, being named Album of the Year for 2006 by Planet Sound, placing third in NME’s Album of the Year for 2006, and was featured in an updated 2007 version of the music reference book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die. Label: Warner Bros.It is hard to believe ten years have passed since British Rockers Muse put out their fourth studio album, Black Holes and Revelations. So, to fully enjoy it, it’s best to turn your brain off and let yourself get sucked in. The album is a black hole of pomp and nothingness, a perfect document of the times. Black Holes is a beast of a record, bombastic in the same way Britney Spears’s In The Zone was superficially sexy. Black Holes wants to be a political statement but it’s too concerned with where its next ridiculously opulent brass section will fit to be anything more than what it is on the surface: expertly produced arena rock that brings chills from its grandiosity, not its heart. Then, of course, there’s the actual music: screeching electric guitars that are overdubbed to death, delay-heavy piano, machine-gun-rapid drumming, and massive orchestral swells, all accented by galloping horses, cyclical synth effects, and guitar solos that could have been written by Daft Punk. There’s even a reference to “glaciers melting” on the sleazy “Supermassive Black Hole,” which bears a vagina metaphor so preposterous (“Superstar sucked into the supermassive/Ooh, ooh, ahh/You set my soul alight”) that if Bellamy is the “superstar” then the vagina must be British. “City Of Delusion,” with its “you’re not divine” sentiment, would be easier to swallow if it weren’t coming from a megalomaniac. Unfortunately, calls-to-arms like “Invincible” and “Exo-Politics” are too self-absorbed to register as anything but anthems for the Che T-shirt-wearing contingent, and “Assassin” is too unsubtle to be anything more than a literal appeal to kill Bush and Blair. The neo-prog rockers’ latest bid for world domination is Black Holes & Revelations, a surprisingly succinct effort that begins with the epic “Take A Bow.” Lyrics like “Our freedom is consuming itself” and “Death, you bring death and destruction to all that you touch” sound melodramatic even to this bleeding heart, and yet it’s impossible not to submit to the song. Matthew Bellamy and his fans might be tired of the constant Radiohead comparisons, but the reason many of us have responded so favorably to Muse is because, like Pavlov’s dog, we salivate at even a trifling idea of what Radiohead used to be.