The Resistance

Here's my official review.
I couldn't agree more with what's been said: meh...
This is an example of a band getting too crazy in the studio and ending up producing something that sounds overwrought and, at times, dare I say a little ridiculous.
It starts out good - Uprising is a good classic style Muse song, with a good hook, and Resistance is a decent song as well (even though the beginning of it is literally the EXACT same as the middle of Citizen Erased off of OoS- come on Matt Bellamy). Two decent tracks, but the beginning of this album has NOTHING on their previous albums. The first time I heard the beginning of Absolution, I knew right then I had to buy the cd just based on one track - and the other albums have similarly explosive beginnings... not so here. If Uprising was the only Muse track I'd ever heard, I don't think I'd give them a chance.
Undisclosed Desires could have caught my attention if it was fleshed out a little better, but I like the chorus, so I'll let it slide as just being a little bit of a throwaway - it'd probably be sweet live though. I like the 80s synth-pop Culture Club kinda sound to it.
Now here is where things get weird. Eurasia just tries to be too epic and ends up coming across as sounding pretty stupid in my opinion. Yeah, we get it, you're channelling Queen... but that was a different time and they created that sound for themselves. Unlike the nods to Queen in BHaR (Soldiers Poem and Knights of Cydonia), Eurasia's "Queen" moments sound out of place and weird. And yeah, we get it you're using the model of the United States for some dystopian future supercountry. But where the political messages were at the exact right time in BHaR, now it just seems like a tired cliche. And Collateral Damage - which is actually just an unnecessarily long quotation of Chopin's famous Eb major nocturne... only with a bunch of wrong notes - is totally unnecessary.
Guiding Light? Boring. Boring. Boring. I've only made it through this track once. It's repetitive, tacky, boring, easily the worst track they have ever written in my opinion. Now looking back on the first couple tracks of this album, you can see its biggest flaw: Muse kinda forgot they were a kickass rock band. No sweet guitar solos, or memorable bass lines, or furious piano/synthesizer arpeggios. It's just all kinda blah. Besides a few nice moments in the first few tracks, there is really no substance here. But then...
THANK FUCKING GOD WE ACTUALLY HAVE A ROCK SONG. Unnatural Selection rocks. Easily one of my favorite tracks on the album. Lightning fast transitions and a good riff. This reminds me of some of their older tracks. Not much to talk about besides that.
MK Ultra is my favorite track. I think it's the most unique and clever track of the album. It's beautiful and rocks at the same time, and it never gets old. This is the one track I've been listening to with great regularity
I Belong to You starts out promising (besides the ridiculously badly conceived "woo!" at the beginning. wtf) Nice funky riff, and the squelchy acid-y bass sound that I always love. But then again with the extensive classical quotations! This time it's from Samson and Delilah. In interviews, Matt Bellamy discussed his experiences seeing the Vienna Opera, and how moving it was. Which is fine, but again - you're a rock band. It almost feels like Muse is pushing to see just how "anti-rock" they can get before they complete alienate their audience. And then when the fast part comes back we're greeted with a rockin... bass clarinet solo. Read those words again. Bass clarinet solo. This is another example of this pushing the envelope too far. And honestly, it could have worked, but whoever's playing is doing it SO unmusically that it may as well be a midi file.
And now we reach the Exogenesis symphony. Which is ok. I like the first "movement" the best out of the three - probably the first time they've successfully created the epic sound they've been trying to create for the whole album. The second and third parts are fine, but it's more of that slow, meandering, unmemorable music. Kind of like the beginning of Invincible before the sweet guitar solo in it.
There are certainly some great moments in The Resistance, but it's like Muse is just yelling "we're a great band! we'll be one of the best! we're going to change music forever!". What were intended to be nods to great musicians and composers end up sounding like self-righteous bullshit, and coming from a classically trained musician, usually end up making Matt Bellamy seem less talented than he actually is - the Chopin Nocturne, in particular, just reeks to me of people I'd always meet who really weren't that great of pianists but would learn to play the same 5 songs in a really half assed way to show off to people, even if their memorization wasn't quite right or even if it was a little sloppy - it's classical music for idiots (no offense meant by that comment, I know it's really elitist of me to say). When Black Holes and Revelations came out I couldn't stop listening to it. Literally. for months. I was finding new things in each track with every listen, and I loved it. I have only listened to The Resistance once all the way through. And I had to check with myself to make sure it wasn't just because my music tastes have changed (because admittedly, I didn't listen to Uplifter or Mantis nearly as much as I should have - the latter I'm listening to more again now :) ). But it's just that The Resistance isn't that strong of an album.
Muse tried to write their Magnum Opus, their Rock Opera. And it just didn't work. Too much strings, too little shredding, too much classical, not enough rock, too much quoting others, not enough coming up with something interesting to say. Well at least we got a couple good tracks out of it...
-Cottonmouth Out