Preposterous. Overblown. Melodramatic. Pretentious. Oh yes, when Radiohead muttered that MUSE should "lighten up", it looks like their comments sent Matt Bellamy and chums into a contrary fury.

So rather than mellow out to produce their own version of 'The Man Who', MUSE have thrown every toy available out of their pram and then thrown the pram itself down a metal staircase, in the process creating an album perfect for the start of the century. The nineteenth century.

Check this little lot out for a list of influences/reference points. Composer Hector Berlioz, whose pieces regularly elicited hysterical weeping in Paris in the 1830s. 'Tocatta And Fugue In D Minor', the classical masterwork that became the template for many of prog's most grandiose excesses during the 1970s. Freddie Mercury. Duetting on 'Barcelona'. And squealing to high heaven during 'Bohemian Rhapsody'. Oh, and a bit of Radiohead. For a second.

Chuck all that into rock's famed Pressure Cooker Of Fame and Grand Expectations and you have a heavy metal space opera performed by the Viennese Symphonic Orchestra featuring the Circus Archaos scrap iron rhythm section. Riffs are hard and unnecessarily complex, Matt squeals with an almost ridiculous sense of torture, the theatre is blood red and magnificent, and the whole affair is fantastically over the top. Christopher Lee would've been proud. Kurt Cobain, you suspect, would have dug it too.
Highlights? Jesus: this is the sound of armageddon, do you not understand? Can you not feel the pain, savour the torment, feel the anguish? Oh, OK then. 'Space Dementia' is like the end of A Zed And Two Noughts being interrupted by a crashing meteor and an invasion of blood thirsty aliens bearing machine guns and spitting green bile. 'Screenager' is 'Trust In Me' from The Jungle Book soundtrack, with a gamelan backing. No really.

It gets more outrageous, as only an album with songs called 'Hyper Music' and 'Megalomania' can. 'New Born' soars on a falsetto from hell before going into fuzz overdrive. 'Bliss' sees Matt flailing at power chords while Rome burns. And on 'Micro Cuts', the only song of the album where MUSE go too far, the singer attempts to recall the cacophony of Madame Castafiore from the Tintin adventures. You can almost see Captain Haddock clasping his hands over his ears in disgust.

The thing is, though, even when MUSE go so far over the top they make Liberace sound like Low, they can't help but impress. Like those Gary Larson cartoons that aren't funny but still entertaining because you can see what he was aiming for, the crimes in 'The Origin Of Symmetry' are worthy ones: ambition, imagination, grand scope and, yes, having a vaguely theatrical, extremely sick sense of humour. Just look at that title, for God's sake! You don't call your album 'The Origin Of Symmetry' without knowing exactly what you're laying yourself open to.

Like Blofeld on a power trip. Fronting a heavy metal band. In space. Don't even think about trying to resist.

Ian Watson