Afternoon Baseball

I first learned of Muse from their two singles off of "Absolution," those being "Hysteria" and "Time Is Running Out." They were mainstream rock enough to make it onto semi-regular MTV/Fuse rotation (with simple performance-based videos, no less), but stuck out for the vocals and the production.
A step backward...
I was at some music store over Christmas break 2004/05 and saw the album on sale. I picked it up, put it in the car, and was absolutely blown away by the (true) opener, "Apocalypse Please." I had no idea that piano and strings were going to round out this band's sound. Little did I know at the time.
This mix of guitars, keys and strings won me over quickly, as did their intensity and the feeling of their songs that the world depended on how they performed.
The point is, there was a lot I liked in the various styles found on the album. Since then, I've seen them blow away the crowd at the U. of Maryland and have caught up on the back catalog.

To me, they are a band that goes for broke. Whatever type of album or type of individual song they do, they seem to want to make it on the grandest scale, the best, biggest and most spectactular of that type. Their apocalyptic subject matter and judicious use of haunting keyboards, distortion, vocal harmonies and other wall-of-sound techniques only adds to this. Their music has complexities, yet can be best heard by simply cranking the volume. The vocals range all over the place in tone, octave and volume, yet boring or complacent they are not. That's a bias on my part, but one of which Muse often has taken advantage.

This intensity, this...fatalistic approach, you might say, is not immediately apparent on "Black Holes and Revelations." I hated the whole album the first time I heard it, finding a disappearance of grand piano, significant guitar work and merely a collection of the drummer's mics turned up and showing off his knowledge of what a fill is. That initial impression, compared to the aforemention reaction to "Absolution," leads me to be a bit down on this album.

The band openly admits to basing some of the sound on "Black Holes..." off of the dance-rock success Franz Ferdinand found (but once, for their second, very consistent but not brilliant album has sold poorly) and incorporting it into their own style.
The influence, though, is only most evident in the first single, "Supermassive Black Hole," which also has a Prince-like feel, of all things, and in the album's truly supermassive track, the fantastic "Map of the Problematique." Pitchfork, for instance, which was not overly impressed (and I agree largely with their general critiques, especially on "Take A Bow"), called this the song Moby tried to write as the theme for the "Bourne" movies. "Extreme Ways" is a damn good song for that movie series, and yet you could see how great it would be to have Matt Damon kicking ass to "Map..." It's one of the best songs they've ever done, and a worthy hybrid successor to the aforementioned MTV singles and songs such as "Endlessly."

Yet the feeling as if you're in the greatest rock opera ever created isn't always there. The vocals don't convey that held-at-gunpoint feeling at times. It's tough to sound insincere when you're singing, "Destroy this city of delusion," but he comes close. Perhaps that's a good thing, for Bellamy largely gets away from the falsetto-at-all-costs vocals that drive the band's critics batty. He's still got a good set of pipes.
Not to focus on the dance-rock angle too much, for it's not as present as early indications led everyone to believe, but it seems almost a step backward for Muse. It's a style that's supposed to entertain, not blow us away or remind us of the grim future and/or end of the world, which is what Muse is all about.
Beyond that, there are ups and downs.

"City of Delusion" and "Hoodoo" both build upon the somewhat-Spanish guitar sound of "Screenager" and "Dark Shines," with the former throwing in a trumpet solo for good measure. The two are among the album's strongest songs in catchiness and in moving the band forward, but neither are reason enough to plop down money for the disc ("Hoodoo," especially, as it's a poor man's "Butterflies and Hurricanes").
"Assassin" has a great metal opening, but is too busy trying to show how loud and fast the drums can be to get around to any type of real song (or a metal-like solo). The drumming is pretty cool, except when it's repeated a few times.
"Exo-Politics" can be interesting to listen to, and might have made a good single, but has possibly the most boring and repetitive riff ever outside of half of Metallica's "St. Anger" album. It shows that they can't go "simple" for radio like so many untalented bands with one grand melody are able to do (see "The Small Print" and "Thoughts Of A Dying Atheist" for previous examples of this), which is an oddity but not insurmountable.
"Invincible" is a ballad in the style of "Sing For Absolution" and "Falling Away With You" without the over-the-top instrumentation of the first and without the heartfelt feel of the second. "Starlight" takes this love-song thing even further. The opener, "Take A Bow," is probably incredible live, but despite fabulous vocals late in the song is a pale comparision to previous openers "New Born" and "Apocalypse Please," both of which blasted the windows out on the album.

Even the closer, which is as prog rock as Muse has ever gotten (and that's saying something), is a bit bizarre. It's a nice homage to Queen, I suppose, and it does grow on you. But as weird as it is, it's Muse at its best: "bombastic, overblown, wilfully obscure, magnificent, portentous, histrionic, eccentric and mental," to quote NME. And while they are right that overblown Muse often brings great music, this is not their signature accomplishment in pretentiousness nor quality. This is merely a step along the way.

Muse has always been a band that made odd-shaped pieces of art that through sheer force entertained -- and sometimes, especially on "Absolution," accomplished both goals equally. This effort feels like a step backward (for instance, even Franz supposedly moved forward on their second album by having reflective piano numbers that the critics loved and the public didn't), and that's before the naysayers bring up the Radiohead/Jeff Buckley objections ad nauseam.
And yet, with all that criticism I've heaped upon it, it's still an ambitious album that's not a complete sacrifice to radio play. Topping the last two albums was probably not realistic. What they've done is possibly the next best thing: Throw out the template and go in a new direction. Muse has an album that will play well live, has some twists and turns, and most importantly, leaves the door open for the band to do anything it wants with its next album.
Hopefully, that'll include getting back to a sense of urgency instead of misguided attempt at trying to get people to sway their hips at the thought of the world crumbling around them.

EDIT: (07/18/06) This review captures a lot of what I wanted to say just in its introduction, and the whole review is spot on. Worth a read.