![]() ( Muse like symmetry.) The often threatening, machinistic work of Howard and Wolstenholme allows Bellamy to smear his soaring vocal and widdly guitar solos over the top – a process that highlights the play of individualistic ecstasies against the monolithic grid patterns beneath. Given these themes of control versus freedom, of encroaching science versus human vulnerability, there’s a pleasing symmetry in Muse’s actual music tonight. I was recently passing through the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge, where an advertised lecture on “Selection bias in dynamically measured super-massive black hole samples” got me humming the riff to Supermassive Black Hole. You could add a Unesco prize for the popularisation of science to the list of awards Muse ought to have won. Science and its applications have long held sway in Muse’s concerns, as have totalitarianism and rebellion – witness the operatic, Orwellian feel of The Uprising from their 2009 album, The Resistance, a song that packs a nod to Blondie’s Call Me. If themes of control run wild through this album and this tour, they’ve sashayed through Muse’s work previously. Songs like Reapers have it all: tangled cat’s cradle guitar from Bellamy, monstrous heaviosity from the rhythm section, and an extended metaphor in which the parallels between remote aerial bombardment and a controlling relationship are wrung satisfyingly dry. Muse’s spectacular stage set for the Drones tour. The gig ends with a tin-rattle for Médecins Sans Frontières. This is the kind of thing PJ Harvey gets MBEs for. Album and tour open with a polyphonic choir of Bellamys singing “My son and my daughter/Killed by drones/Our lives between your fingers and your thumbs/Do you feel anything?”, the arrangement drawn from Sanctus et Benedictus by Palestrina. Matt Bellamy’s interest in defence procurement isn’t merely geeky, metallic or paranoid it’s also fiercely compassionate. The band themselves veer between affecting moments of profundity, and the kind of arena rock theatre that adds a floor or two to the measure “over the top”. Dancing around the sky, they are far more pretty than sinister, like Zen zorbs designed by Steve Jobs. Instead of actual drones, we have translucent hovering orbs. You can’t help but feel, though, that given the opportunity and the subject matter, Muse might have tried to terrify us a little more with their aerial display. After all a 12-year-old can pick one up on the internet. In this case, however, you are tempted to swivel your eyes. ![]() Grumbling about health and safety legislation is usually the habit of swivel-eyed little Englanders, not sophisticated opera-rock nuts. ![]() They veer between profundity and the kind of arena rock theatre that adds a floor or two to the measure 'over the top' Having written an entire album about drone warfare – well, 2015’s Drones was partially about that, and partially about how heartbreak feels like an assault by hostile forces – the Teignmouth band have not been permitted to fly any actual drones over the heads of their audiences on the Drones world tour. All is as it should be, apart from one detail. Wolstenhome bats a giant confetti-filled balloon away with his bass. The riffs from Led Zeppelin’s Heartbreaker and AC/DC’s Back in Black are quoted. The songs are meaty, precise and loud, recalling Queen to U2 to Marilyn Manson (the glam stompers, chiefly). ![]()
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