O2, Dublin:For such an unassuming, high concept rock band, Devon's Muse are unashamedly riding roughshod over the competition. With a number one album ( The Resistance) in more than 16 countries and an arena tour that sold out in minutes, they are in danger of making us forget that there's a financial crisis blighting our lives – plus a lethal dose of swine flu.
The last time Muse played indoors in Dublin was at the Point in 2007, when their stage set included a Nasa-style lighting rig; the music came mostly from their fourth album,
Black Holes & Revelations
, a portentous, baroque prog-disco-metal hybrid which embraced everything that was histrionic and OTT about rock music. This time out, the (still impressive) visuals have been toned down a notch or two, but the music, and its narrative threads, is just as brilliantly barmy.
Lead singer and pint-sized guitar hero Matt Bellamy is responsible for the sci-fi conspiracy-theory concept behind
The Resistance
: in short, many of the Earth’s natural and moral resources have diminished to the point where humanity – in a little bit of a hissy-fit, perhaps – goes in search of another planet in the universe to start a more utopian society. Cue songs about socio-political and civil turmoil (
Uprising
), tactical superpowers (
United Sates of Eurasia
), and the race for a new interplanetary home (
Exogenesis
).
Paranoiac rubbish with pearls and rubies attached? Maybe, but Muse persuasively temper the concept with a grandstanding show that mixes Kraftwerk with Fritz Lang, 19th-century opera with George Orwell, computer code with Led Zeppelin, and Timbaland with an orchestral suite.
On paper, this might seem like an unwieldy mess, but it’s all executed with such attention to detail, and with such audacious indifference to derision, that it ends up as a thoroughly entertaining blend of ambition, pretention and to-infinity-and-beyond progressive rock thrills.
