I can’t recall there being such a ludicrous parade of advance singles preceding any other Muse album, but since in past years I used to make a habit of ignoring singles before the album came out so that I could hear everything in its intended context, I suppose I couldn’t tell you for sure. Holy cow, did it feel like those standalone singles just kept on coming without any explanation of a greater reason for their existence, starting in mid-2017 with “Dig Down” and leading right up to somewhere in the middle of 2018, when it was finally confirmed that yes, there’s finally an album behind all of this random and weirdly poppy and mildly plagiaristic new material coming from Muse. One could hear so much of the tension between wanting to have rose-tinted, happy-childhood-memory-triggering fun, and wanting to say something defiant and uplifting in the face of the world appearing to go to hell in a handbasket, in the singles that led up to release of 2018’s Simulation Theory. Starting in 2016, it was time to have some good old fashioned lighthearted fun again, to think back to warm memories of more nostalgic times and look forward to the hope of a brighter future ahead, because HOLY SHIT WHAT JUST HAPPENED IN THOSE TWO ELECTIONS OMG BRITAIN AND AMERICA ARE BOTH MAJORLY SCREWED. And I think its themes of warfare and heartless tyrannical governments pulling the levers from afar were a bit of a downer for Muse as the tour for that album wore on, causing them to sort of react against the bombast a bit as they began to plan out the next phase of their career. I haven’t really gone back to that album much since it was new. Our patience has certainly been tested on albums like 2012’s The 2nd Law, which tried to explore the concept of entropy and the band’s newfound fascination with dubstep wubs and came out one hell of a mixed bag, and for me it nearly reached the breaking point on the far-too-serious and sometimes downright harsh Drones, released in 2015. As long as they have fun with it and we have fun with it, and they continue to surprise the audience in ways that are generally more awe-inspiring than cringe-inducing, Muse fans are willing to live with it. Sure, they often bite off more than they can chew with their concept albums and their themes of political intrigue and conspiracy theories and alien invasions and whatever whackadoo stuff comes to Matt Bellamy‘s mind. And yet that’s generally the most stereotypical observation one could make about the band. There are very few times that I’d ever accuse this larger-than-life English rock trio of attempting something low-key and intimate. You could probably rubber-stamp that statement every three years or so for the last decade, and it would be true each time. “ Muse has a new album out, and it’s loud and bombastic and goofy and kind of hard to take seriously.” This is not a great Muse record, but it’s a catchy one, I guess. Mining the nostalgia of our childhood and marrying that to modern sounds in off-the-wall ways is fun and all, but when this record tries to throw its hat into the ring of contemporary political discourse, it comes across as vague, outdated, and honestly a tad hypocritical. In Brief: A kinder, gentler Muse than we last heard on Drones somehow manages to be ridiculous and over-the-top (as usual) without being enough of either of those things for it to really matter.
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