Muse: Origin of Symmetry (2001), The Resistance (2009)
since a part of the winter drumline show i'm writing for Hermiston involves Muse, i downloaded a couple of their albums to be more familiar with their music since the only thing i really knew by them was the song "Resistance". I've been listening to these two albums now off and on for the past week trying to get it in my head to see what's useable for creative design.
i'm not sure what to think about the band. it's not *bad* by any means and i can even say that it transcends a lot of alternative pop music today, but i have a hard time finding anything particularly groundbreaking about what they're doing. They clearly have a lot of "classical" music influence in some of their compositional choices, particularly when it comes to chord progressions and certain stylistic choices of line, but once you get past that, it still feels very formulaic, and it suffers from lack of tension, push and pull, and the lack of redefining expectation or formulas within a song or across an album.
Granted, i feel the same way about Dream Theater which is why i stopped listening to them, and they're one of the more musically complex bands that i know of. I think that my appreciation for that stuff waned once i started to get into electronica since there are many more boundaries to break in that realm given that the basic musical palette is so non-standard. No matter how brilliant a dream theater/muse/whatever album may be, once you hear sound vocabulary of the band, it never changes. a snare drum is always a snare drum and is the same snare drum. The guitar sound is always the guitar sound. And once a band has a signature sound/formula they tend to stick with that sort of formula/sound texture, which after a while makes it bland for me even if there's fluxuation in their individual music choices. It takes a particular band who uses standard instruments to push through that sort of expectation (if that is their intent), to find a proper balance of establishing the expected sounds and expected paradigm and its fusion with non-traditional elements. I think that's why i like PVT so much. Shudder To Think qualifies in that category too, which makes it unfortunate that that band no longer exists. Mr. Bungle. &c.
it's interesting how all of that plays in my head. i've had Clark's "totem's flare" album for months at least and i still never get sick of hearing it over and over again. I hear these two Muse albums and i'm already starting to get sick of them and i've only been listening to them for days. *shrug* them's the breaks.