0.44.0 - Gravity, no escaping gravity
The connection might not seem obvious at first; either between our conversation following the Lorde show and these two bands, or between the two bands themselves, though lets be honest here, if you can't find the connection between Muse and Queen on your own its possible you just haven't listened to either of those bands much.
I wrote about Showbiz back in January of this year, but not at any length and I think at that time I held back deliberately knowing that at some point I'd end up confronting my feelings on Muse at length. I also wrote about them in a similar context back in 2017 and eight years of new Muse material hasn't changed my core belief about them, which I will try and sum up here.
Let's say you have formed a band, and achieved some success and recognition. Let's assume you've got there through some intent, some style, something which makes you recognisably you, as opposed to 'just another band making X kind of music'. That's great, I'm really pleased for you, and if you've truly found something, no matter how small, that sets you apart, that's powerful springboard for recognition, but it also forces you to make a fundamental decision about the direction of your career going forward.
What do you do next?
Maybe you are Radiohead, and you decide that the only path forward is rejection of what came before, striving for something different, to ensure that whatever the outcome you know you made something unique, even if you drove people away by doing it. You can take the path of Queen; make each album its own project, its own thing, but grounded in a unifying house style, an accepted formula of performance - every album a different confection from the same box of chocolates, a variety of textures and flavours, but ultimately all coming from the same place. You can adopt the zen approach, be accepting of who you are what is expected of you; find a lane and stick to it, maybe only looking to refine or expand on your core competency; I call this 'doing a Kings of Leon'.
But maybe, in the rare case, you choose chaos. You take a single part of what you are a whole and fixate on it, because you think that's what your fans want and you know that's really what your kink is and you just lean into it harder, and bigger, and more, until it becomes the only part of what you are, an ever expanding ripple moving endlessly away from the point of impact until its just a tide lapping on a distant shore. This was what Muse did.
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'Knights of Cydonia' is to blame. There's a part of me that feels like Muse felt they were missing their answer to Radiohead's Paranoid Android, another part of me thinks lead singer Matt Bellamy woke up one morning and wanted to write the opening credits song for a Space Anime Western because he'd taken too much flu medication and fallen asleep watching Cowboy Bebop. No matter the reason, the power of a six and a half minute space opera with distinct sections and time changes and musical motifs, and the success of that song amongst the vocal part of the Muse fandom (and how that interacted with the things Matt Bellamy himself has admitted he is fascinated by) was where Muse passed the event horizon into their own inescapable gravity well.
Prior to this, on Origin of Symmetry and Absolution I thought for a time that they had positioned themselves somehow as the alternative-reality version of Radiohead; the version that wanted to make more music in the style of the Bends, that wanted to be arch and self aware and insecure and cover that all with layers of compelling musicianship; the ascending scales that herald the arrival of Plug In Baby, the thundering piano crashes that feel like violence as they explode throughout Apocalypse Please, the frenetic pace of Stockholm Syndrome, the distant, tumbling emptiness of Endlessly. This was the Muse that took what began with Showbiz and slid seamlessly into the void left by Radiohead as they headed into uncharted grounds with Kid A and Amnesiac.
But through ill luck, strange intent, or cosmic fate, when Black Holes and Revelations was released and the bombast, the space, the opera, and the space opera all collided in a particular way, Muse's path was set. Future albums would degenerate into "Oops all Galactic Arias" and with each new Muse album, the distance I'd have to travel to meet those albums where they were became longer, stretched further, and with such diminished returns that it was easier not to make the trip in the first place. I still believe that Origin of Symmetry might be a perfect album; it is certainly the best of the Muse albums in my opinion, though I've a huge fondness for Showbiz and Absolution as well.
In the spirit of fairness, I will freely admit that the later Muse offerings still bring incredible energy in a live environment; with high production stage shows, laser light displays and flickering holograms, it feels more complete, more whole than it does as purely a piece of music; but I am a lover of music, and music that has to be accompanied with anything in order to get close to the value I can find in just a single Pink Floyd song, or early Muse song before such things were a consideration, has missed the mark somewhat for me.
Well, in part because they have such a historical and varied canon long before they started having fun and indulging their whackier side; any band which already has nine critically acclaimed albums under their belt before throwing their creative weight behind the highly camp Flash Gordon soundtrack get a free pass to do something goofy for themselves. Even then, The Works exists as another workhorse Queen album, one which features some of their most iconic songs - I Want To Break Free, Radio Ga-Ga, Hammer To Fall to name the three best loved - showing the band know when to take themselves seriously and when to go off on flights of fancy.
I really love A Kind Of Magic just because I loved the Highlander film as a teen and the two are unavoidably interlinked in my brain. I wish more action films just went to a band and said "here's the screenplay, come to the set, and then write us something that works" and just let them loose. The action-oriented songs on this album, the ones filled with high drama like Princes of the Universe and The Prize, perform a trick almost the opposite of the later Muse, conjuring images into your mind without the need for an explicit visual component. The album also allows itself to not get caught up strictly in being a soundtrack album, songs like One Year of Love and Friends Will Be Friends could have easily have appeared on another Queen album without appearing out of place. Following on, The Miracle is finds it way back to a classic Queen formula - the outlier flights of fancy replaced with solid glam rock and emotional balladeering.
So maybe its a question of intensity, of timing, of self-seriousness. I never once imagined Queen furrowing their brow, figuring out how to give their fans a more expansive, more overblown, more all-encompassing version of the songs from the Highlander film because some of them had become popular. There's no serious meditations of the vastness of space. But for Muse, they somehow became trapped by their own black hole, clawing forever against forces they unleashed and could never escape; all that remained for them was to set their controls for the heart of the sun, and see what lay on the other side. In the process, they left some of us behind.
