Space Prog: The Final Frontier - Muse

Back when we had yet to be infected by the twin evils of fickleness and cynicism, seeing Muse live for the first time was one of this writer’s truly revelatory gig experiences. What stood out was not the venue that night, London’s perpetually sweaty Astoria (by 2004 they’d be selling out two nights at Earls Court), or even the support act (a certain Coldplay, who at that point had yet to release ‘Yellow’), but the sheer volume and amp-troubling intensity with which Muse played. Debut album ‘Showbiz’, with its distinct air of pre-millennial angst and jagged guitars merely hinted at what was to come, creating a sense around Muse of, well, supermassive potential that these storming live shows only seemed to confirm.

Six years later and not only has this expectation been surpassed, it’s been positively destroyed in a rush of crazy conspiracy theories (see: anything that frontman Matt Bellamy has ever said) and the pushing of mainstream rock into the more audacious, extreme and audience-splitting ends since anyone dared use the word ‘progressive’, or even worse, Queen. “Some stuff is complex” concedes softly-spoken, eminently polite drummer Dominic Howard direct from his base in London. “Like ‘Take A Bow’, which goes on a weird, genre-morphing journey…It starts with a very classical feel with strings, taking it into a synthy 80s techno period, and then ends up as over-the-top apocalyptic rock. That was the point. We wanted to push that one as far as possible”

He giggles briefly at this description, as if acknowledging that the crash of styles and the level of ambition alluded to on the new album’s opening track may, at least on paper, seem slightly pretentious. In truth, the recorded version is likely to sound ten times as good as you’d dare hope. “Whereas ‘Starlight’ (another track from the new album); it took us a while to figure out how to keep that simple, because we knew it needed to be. But I think it’s probably one of the hardest songs, because we didn’t know how to be simple with it. We kept making it more complex than it needed to be and it took a long time to get right!” Muse are never ones to do things by half.

Aforementioned new album ‘Black Holes & Revelations’, the band’s fourth studio release, promises to be the defining British record of the year, hyperbole be damned. Having just heard the album in its entirety, we can tell you that ‘Black Holes…’ will eat ‘Razorlight’ for ambition, swagger past the new Kasabian, out-experiment Thom Yorke and even, whisper it, contend with the Monkeys for first-week sales. Well maybe not. It will be glorious, especially if the stunning Prince-meets-Daft Punk alien-disco of first single ‘Supermassive Black Hole’ has got you frothing at the mouth for more:

”’Supermassive Black Hole’ is one of the more extreme musical departures because it is very electronic sounding and Matt’s falsetto all the way through…it sounds like a very different area for Muse to go in and that was really exciting. We thought we’d put that out first, not for any shock factor just because we wanted to release something representing how we might have moved on” As for whether ‘S.M.B’ reflects the album in any particular way, Dom says “There’s no song on this album that really represents the album. Every song has character. Every song has its own space”

If what Gigwise has heard are anything to go by, this individual “character” and “space” on each track sounds like its reflected in a far broader range of instruments and influences? “Certainly yeah, there’s a lot more musical experimentation” agrees Dom. “There’s more of an electronic exploration. We’ve kind of touched before on synths and things, but we personally got really really deep into it (on the new album) and lost our minds! A lot of the songs were born out of playing with more electronic instruments rather than learning songs on the acoustic, or bass, drums and piano. A lot of the songs were born out of experimenting with things that we’re not used to playing. But we just kind of went for it. We knew some of it was going to be difficult to play live, but we didn’t consciously think about it." Alongside the prominence of synthesisers, Dom also references Spaghetti Western legend Ennio Morricone (who recently worked on the new Morrissey record), noise makers Lightning Bolt and, obviously, southern Italian folk music as inspirations for Muse whilst in the studio.