Muse: The Resistance is an awesome album

Muse: The Resistance

I was a bit late to notice the sweet new album release by Muse, so I didn’t listen to it until September 18th.  It was released on September 15th to much praise, fanfare, and of course…torrents.  I listened to this album a few times over the past couple days, and I think it’s amazing.

The last time Muse released an album was back in 2006, “Black Holes and Revelations” which contained a flurry of heavy, progressive rock.  “The Resistance” blends classical influences into their rock sound and seamlessly weaves this together into some truly symphonic music.  It’s part symphony, part rock opera, and part Queen which kept me listening from beginning to end.  I usually skip around albums because either I have no patience to wait, or there’s like one good song.  This British rock group finally goes in a cool direction after showing hints of what they were capable of in previous albums.

Lead singer Matt Bellamy is awesome.  There’s “Resistance”, which is one of the top songs on this album.  There’s “Unnatural Selection” which begins with an organ that goes into some sweet guitar work.  Finally, you have to listen to “United States of Eurasia (+ Collateral Damage)”, a song that borrows from a classic and reminds me of Queen.  It begins with a soft piano that builds into an emphatic chorus of voices and guitars.  It ends with Bellamy playing Frédéric Chopin’s “Nocturne in E Minor” which puts a nice touch on this epic song.

The best part and most ambitious part of the album are the last three songs.  “Exogenesis” is a three part space rock symphony played out with a full orchestra and Bellamy’s operatic voice.  The orchestral elements of the song are arranged by Matthew Bellamy.  He stated he wanted to do this himself as he “never wanted to collaborate with a string arranger as they may make it theirs.”

I was half awake when I first heard this song, and I imagined some stuff.  The term exogenesis is the technical name for panspermia, the hypothesis that life is seeded across the universe from other sources.

Sunset in space over the Pacific Ocean - shot by NASA

However,  I thought about a space opera and a futuristic war/romance.   There’s some ordinary guy.  He’s on vacation aboard some huge space cruise ship, and he’s at a space opera.  He sees a woman that intrigues him.  They meet.  A romance starts (insert some montage here).  Cut to a ballroom scene where he’s dancing with her underneath a huge glass dome with the stars shining down.  Suddenly, some alien space pirate ship attacks the cruise ship…lmao…and attempts to hijack it.  He runs with the girl to the escape pods as explosions happen all around them, and people die left and right.  There’s a message that broadcasts over the PA that the captain is dead, run for your lives.

He comes to the realization that if he doesn’t stay behind and distract them, no one will escape alive.  He knows he’s the only one who can do this, so he asks her to trust him, and she does.  They both stay behind and run toward the command bridge.  They steer the ship in a different direction from where the escape pods are shooting.  After everyone leaves, they check to see if they can escape.  There’s a ship left.  Before they make their escape, they set the ship on a collision course with the attacking ship.

It ends with them in the escape pod looking back and watching as the ships collide in a spectacular explosion.  They look at each other and realize they are still alive and still together.  I was not on any drugs when I thought about this.  Damn, this would TOTALLY make an interesting music video.