Think of the Rapture. Think huge piercing walls of light, think stereotropic shimmers careening off fans, think of a multimedia kaleidoscope revolving around four giant, baroque test tubes, then think again. A chord, a slow ebb, a beat, a rhythm, a pulse . . . and then a wail. Matthew Bellamy, howling just a little louder than his guitar, trying to get the images into our eyes even as he pumps the music—loud reverberant chunks—up our soles, through our spines, into our souls. There’s Chris Wolstenholme, stage right, holding everything down with a bass guitar and an occasional chorus. Dominic Howard, center, seated on a monolithic throne of drums and poised to strike. And bonus performer, Morgan Nichols, lurking behind Matt, but not with the sinister vibe that some of the Muse songs convey; he’s there to maintain the samples and to play the keyboard. And then there’s you, bathed in this radiant light, this luxuriant sound – yes, think of the Rapture.
This particular miracle comes with a name – “Butterflies and Hurricanes” – and if you’re not adequately prepared, has the potency of a curse to boot. Until you’ve seen this song live, you haven’t heard Muse. And once you’ve been cowed by the brilliance, it’s hard to go back to the processed sound of a monochrome CD, spinning silently in its little shrine. Following the overall Muse formula, “Butterflies and Hurricanes” begins with a soft, foreboding lull, a slow sinking that, after a minute, you suddenly realize has started, impossibly, to rise. The CD its from, Absolution, can’t adequately capture the surge in energy, but it's even worse at translating the song’s unusual bridge. After reversing into a neo-classical instrumental section, it fades out in a twinkle of staccato keystrokes, only to return, seconds of silence later, with Matt on the piano. In the midst of a rock concert, amidst sweaty, crowd-surfing fans, an instrumental homage to classical music has taken center stage; what’s more, it’s crawled under your skin, and the nuances tickle your body like a sudden, delightfully delusional fit.
It’s 10:00 in the Hammerstein Ballroom, NYC. I don’t have children, and if I did, I certainly wouldn’t know where they were. Muse has been playing for an hour (long enough to blot out all but the knowledge that the openers, The Cloud Room, were terrible), and they’ll play for another forty minutes. There have been ballads, there’s been fight music, there’s been their darkly fantastical alternative rock, and there’s been a lot of Matt, working the guitar as much as the stage, scrooning (screaming + crooning) a slick, solid sound from a world born of synthetic harmony and angry guitars. I’m blown away by the lush, vibrant feeling rising once more through my bones as we segue into “Feeling Good,” a sultry mix of lo-fi jazz and hard rock, and yes, I think, I am feeling good. How could I not?
(The next day, listening to my Muse collection, the recordings seem tame. “Hysteria,” which brought the whole audience at least three feet into the air with its rocketing line of guitar shreds, now seems once removed, more intellectual than emotional. “Stockholm Syndrome,” which erupted through my body, seems quiet even after I turn the knob on my stereo to the max. Live, I remember the trippy electronic chorus actually tripping people up, the guitar’s jagged lead back in to the meat of the song made the comatose wake up. Give me a few days—let me wash the raw feedback from my brain—and I’ll be fine with this silvery imitation. But let me think of the concert instead.)
The point of this tour is presumably to help bolster sales of the new Muse CD, Black Holes and Revelations, which hasn’t gotten overwhelmingly favorable reviews. Well, I didn’t like the CD at first either, but as I said earlier, they weren’t listening to Muse properly. Performed live, crackling across that fourth wall with the intensity of stagecraft and the wit of their songsmithery, it’s a great album. “Take a Bow,” an opening number for the album and this tour, builds from an oscillating series of synthesized notes to at last proclaim, in breathy tones hurdling over a wall of guitar strokes, “Burn/you will burn/you will burn in hell/yeah you’ll burn in hell/burn in hell/burn in hell/burn in hell for your sins.” In concert, it’s like watching Muse summon the devil himself to punish an unnamed but corrupt, charismatic leader of a free country who brings death and destruction to all he touches.
With the exception of “Starlight,” the album’s title track, all of the new songs on this tour are great to watch. “Starlight,” incidentally, isn’t bad—it’s just outclassed by the rest of the concert on account of being too cute, and being too similar of a ballad to their older work. Their best new song, “City of Delusion,” which counterposes a sterling trumpeter against a swooping violinist, was unfortunately not performed, and this exposes the one flaw of the set list: an overemphasis on high-octane established hits, and not enough time with their more exotic and experimental work, or slow songs, like “Ruled by Secrecy.” Instead, they performed tracks like “Supermassive Black Hole”—their first single, which is close to being a progressive pop-rock song, and owes much of its beauty to Gorillaz—and an adapted version of “Knights of Cydonia,” their fight-music finale. With the use of the projector screens, the audience rose to their feet, screaming the chorus: “No one’s gonna take me alive/the time has come to make things right/you and I must fight for our rights/you and I must fight to survive.” (As opposed to their performance of fan-favorite “Time is Running Out,” which had us belting the chorus anyway.)
Muse has reached a point where it has amassed enough certified hits to make their tours a preview of their eventual “Greatest Hits.” It’s a little stunning to realize that, solid as this show was, it still left out plenty of great hits, like “Hypermusic” (a perfect eponym for both the song and what Muse performs) and “Space Dementia.” One only hopes that future tours will not be needlessly reliant on their new CD (though it’s hard to say that a song like “Invincible” is a crutch so much as a blessing) and that some of the popularly bland hits like “Plug in Baby” will be excised in favor of more varied songs like “Screenager.”
But hey, I understand the desire to fill a large space with energy, only energy, and nothing but energy, so help them God. And Muse has a sterling bankroll of older hits like “New Born” and “Tsp” that could carry them for the next seven years, even if they never released a new CD. But if this concert is any indication of Muse’s strength and solidarity—how Matt keeps his throat from exploding is a mystery—this Liverpool trio will keep producing their eclectic and increasingly ambient music for fans for years to come. But why wait years? See them now, and then mail your moot CDs to me.
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