Muse – Absolution (2003): I still feel dirty
Rating: 2 1/2 stars (out of five)
You can’t read eight words on Allmusic’s biography of Muse without reaching the word Radiohead; and given lead singer Matthew Bellamy’s obvious love for Thom Yorke, that’s not a surprise. Musically, though, Absolution, the band’s third album, doesn’t really resemble any Radiohead discs. There are hints of The Bends here, but with its dark stylings and heavy dose of drama, Absolution reminded me more of Placebo. The problem, though, is that Muse, a relatively unknown band quickly gaining in prominence, sounds like Radiohead- and Placebo-lite, without the skill to transcend their influences.
Absolution is filled with Bellamy’s paranoid and stark observations about the future of the world lined up next to the band’s oppressive sound. The two forces fit each other, there’s no doubt about that, but the combination just doesn’t work. This is largely because the music, and the production, sounds horribly claustrophobic. The songs are not allowed to breathe whatsoever, and by mid-way through the album, the listener craves a break. More talented bands and producers have created albums that are depressive and/or haunting, to be sure, but here Muse miss that target and end up sounding swampy and muddled. The production further becomes a problem because there is very little melody anywhere to be found here; these two facts leave Muse playing intense but indistinctive and sludgy rock.
Fans of alternative rock may find enough to like here, especially on “Time is Running Out” and “Falling Away With You,” but repeated listens reveal too many imperfections in the songs and the lyrics. Tracks like “Stockholm Syndrome” arrest attention on first listens, but after a while they don’t seem to hold together, simply fading away into irrelevance in the listener’s mind. “Blackout” sounds appealing at first, but by the end of the song, Bellamy’s words starts to grate. He moans uber-pessimistic lines like “This love’s too good to last” without ever really telling us why. “I’m too old to change”—really?
Elsewhere, he rants that “This is the end of the world!” and “The end is all I can see,” which represent the tone of the entire album, but none of it registers much of an emotional impact. As “Blackout” makes clear, Bellamy doesn’t take the next step of telling us why he’s so paranoid, what makes him so pessimistic, what perspective he can offer us besides apocalyptic visions. He also slips up lyrically on “Falling Away,” where a multitude of absolutist clichés (“I’ll love whatever you become”; “I know I won’t forget a thing”; “All of the hopes we cherished fade”) de-mystify an otherwise stately song.
“Time is Running Out” deserves keeping around, possessing both a melody and a skillful build of tension. The mischievous lyrics—easily the album’s best—express that undeniable but often unexplainable interest in unstable relationships (“You’re something beautiful, a contradiction / I wanna play the game, I want the friction”). They’re less successful at relating to the album’s overall theme (as expressed in the song’s chorus and title) that we’re all doomed, as Bellamy likely wanted them to, but they work in the four engrossing minutes of the song.
But ultimately, Absolution, despite being just 12 earnest songs (two brief Morning Glory-style instrumentals not included), feels overwhelmingly long, a fact traceable to the oppressive sound and unmemorable songs. Rolling Stone’s Album Guide describes an album by Scott Walker as “top-heavy with pretentious abstraction, self-consciously difficult and often actively unpleasant,” which sums up my feelings on Absolution pretty much to a T. In small doses, Muse’s music works better, but they have a long way to go before an entire album is worth listening to.
June 2nd, 2010 at 7:47 pm
Great read, well argumented critique! I love this album myself, in my opinion it is a very refined and consistent album, thematically that is. Bookmarked, cool blog!