The inner
sleeve of MUSE's second album contains an illustration by Darrell
Gibbs depicting humans marching into a giant white cube. In tiny lettering
above the door, a sign reads 'CHAOS'. Welcome indeed to the beautiful
nightmare world of the most distorting, cartoon intense, baroque'n'roll
band that Britain has ever produced.
Here comes their razorblade stuffed-toy singer Matt Bellamy, hanging
from the chandelier of his overblown musical ability, electrodes screwed
into his brain, singing like a harpy on fire, playing the funeral
mass organ with his toes. Here's bassist Chris Wolstenholme and drummer
Dominic Howard sounding like Edvard Munch's backing band. And here
unfolds the profane, expressionist, hyper-thrilling vista feared by
all those hoping the band were just Radiohead with a Freddie Mercury
complex.
In two years of public life MUSE have accumulated a high-pressured
mythology. Half a million copies of their debut 'Showbiz' and one
iMac advert down the line, they've strewn a totemic trail of destroyed
equipment, confessed to a taste for mushrooms, seances and Hector
Berlioz's 'Grande Messe Des Morts', and announced, "If I couldn't
do this I would not want to live".
The stakes were high. Their reinvention of grunge as a neo-classical,
high gothic, future rock, full of flambéd pianolas and white-knuckle
electric camp, is a precarious venture. Yet as the bloody abattoir
riff kicks in on 'New Born', colliding with Bellamy's fairy dreamtime
piano, it's apparent that MUSE can handle their brutal arias.
Almost everything on 'Origin Of Symmetry' is overstated, but with
Matt reined in by the constraints of a dirty rock three-piece, the
operatic stuff is devastatingly channelled. 'Bliss' is all carnage
riffs and a pleasingly corrupt lyric about innocence envy. 'Space
Dementia' sets Bellamy's grand piano mastery up against vaulting rock.
'Hyper Music' burns with a genuinely new, art punk rage.
Given the ultra-vivid tones of MUSE's palette - purity, insanity,
corruption, virtual consciousness, Bach, metal and barking madness
- it's not surprising they overstep their overstepping. A happy Bellamy
singing (literally) to the butterflies on 'Feeling Good' sits oddly,
and the organ fugue finale is somewhat Hammer horror, even if the
track's called 'Megalomania'. But relentlessly, on 'Dark Shines',
'Screenager', particularly 'Micro Cuts' and of course 'Plug In Baby',
they add vicious, original serrations to the hysterical edge of extreme
rock. It's amazing for such a young band to load up with a heritage
that includes the darker visions of Cobain and Kafka, Mahler and The
Tiger Lillies, Cronenberg and Schoenberg, and make a sexy, populist
album. But MUSE have carried it off. It's their 'Siamese Dream'. Now
begins the psychoanalysis.
Thom Yorke's least favourite word is 'angst'; Matt Bellamy's is about
to become 'psychotic'. We're the lucky ones who get to look at the
pretty shapes as the blood hits the wall.
Roger Morton