Ridiculousness: it’s a sort of art form, right? From Dadaism via Salvador Dali making a telephone out of a crustacean, right up to that modernist, Hogarthian TV thing set in Essex where everyone’s got glitter on their flaps. Absurdity has found a way in. It’s welcome.
Luckily, Muse, the nation’s foremost purveyors of ridiculous rock music, have remembered this on their sixth album.
There’s a moment, about two minutes into ‘The 2nd Law’, roughly when Matt Bellamy unleashes the fi rst of his spiralling operatic ululations, and just before the brass band, when you realise that Muse have left the saturnine sounds of ‘The Resistance’ far behind. The relative po-facedness of that record has been rejected in favour of a lurid technicolour and sci-fi grandiloquence that makes even the intergalactic whirlpools of ‘Black Holes And Revelations’ seem no bigger than something you’d putt a golf ball into.
Of course, some of it you’ll already know: ‘Survival’ you’ll recognise from its role as the offi cial song of the Olympics, no doubt recalling with a wince the vast scale of all that was implausible about it; from the portentous symphony of piano and bleating Bellamys at the beginning, right up to the Omen-like apex, with its demented chant of “Win!Win!Win!”.
The dubstep-inspired and politically-charged ‘The 2nd Law: Unsustainable’, trailed well in advance of the album’s release, is even more mental, like Skrillex having a go at writing Have I Got News For You?, The Musical. ‘Madness’ is somewhere between U2’s ‘Lemon’ and Queen’s ‘A Kind Of Magic’; ‘Panic Station’ sounds like INXS; ‘Liquid State’ like Death From Above 1979 riding jetskis over Niagra.
The scale is such that you have to stand back in a kind of addled awe. Much in the same way that you might regard a 75ft-high luminous pink pissing fl amingo water feature; you have to admire the size of the ambition and the craftsmanship, even if it’s not something you’d
necessarily want at your own house.
It’s a folly, really. Bellamy, Chris Wolstenholme and Dominic Howard are merely the bored eccentrics with nothing better to do than build it. Frankly, it’d be churlish to begrudge them the indulgence.
