i just read that Muse are doing a SXSW show this saturday at Stubbs.


want to be there.

whaaaaaaaat? what? what? what? noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo. 

want to ditch spoon and take a longer road trip? 

Muse headlines a conspiracy of rock 'n' roll

Via word of mouth, not to mention an over-the-top live show, Muse is conquering North America, one fan at a time
By Adrian Mack

Something happened at England’s the Guardian last May that must have thrilled Muse singer-guitarist Matthew Bellamy. British writer-actor Charlie Skelton was sent by the esteemed newspaper to check out the Bilderberg Group conference in Athens. His mission? To investigate and perhaps bring a rational perspective to the mysterious annual meeting of the super elite while blogging a characteristically chucklesome hit piece on all those paranoid nut cases out there who think it’s where lizard people gather to eat human babies.

By his ninth and last dispatch, Skelton was a wreck, having been chased, detained, and generally brutalized by Greek police and other shadowy figures who manifestly didn’t give a flying shit about his rinky-dink media credentials. “Believe me when I say,” Skelton wrote, “I feel afraid. I’ve had my own little seaside dip into a police state and the water’s coming over my head.” He finished with an emotional plea for the media or “anyone” to shine some light on the clandestine and somewhat sinister summit. “That’s how much my life has changed,” he stated.

Four months later, Muse opened its highly anticipated fifth album, The Resistance, with the words, “Paranoia is in bloom…”. It’s the first line from “Uprising”, a hefty and rousing chunk of neo-glam adroitly fused to the Dr. Who theme, and probably the raddest song you’ll ever hear about the banking crisis. And you’ve definitely heard it, because Muse in 2010 is like U2 in 1983—a surging grassroots phenomenon poised to consume North America. And as Bellamy notes in a call to the Straight from his dressing room in Detroit, the odd little three-piece has gotten there through old-fashioned “word of mouth”.

“I think we’re one of the few bands who are getting through to a wider audience without the use of traditional public relations,” he offers. “It’s quite exciting, actually, and it shows that it can be done.” It’s also tempting to wonder if Muse is riding the same Zeitgeist-y wave expressed in Skelton’s dramatic conversion. Bellamy’s subject matter has long been drawn from Forteana and what we’ll reluctantly call “conspiracy theory”. But let’s assume—just for now—that it’s the music that comes first.

So far, The Resistance is the defining album of Muse’s 16-year journey, wherein the band’s thing for Queen—you would think a debt that big would have defaulted by now—is retrofitted to prog, electronica, ’80s stadium rock, and a loose narrative about, um, encroaching world totalitarianism. All of which actually sounds comparatively sane by the time you get to the climactic symphonic piece, “Exogenesis”, which considers humankind’s eventual exodus into space. In three parts, no less.

In other words, Muse is slightly fucking bonkers. Some might say gloriously so.

“If they got to spend a week with us in the studio,” starts bassist Chris Wolstenholme, talking to the Straight from Montreal a few days prior to Bellamy, “I think the one thing people would be shocked by is how much we laugh at ourselves. When we were recording ‘United States of Eurasia’, it initially had a very ’70s kind of ballad feel to it. And it wasn’t really until we started recording it and playing it as a band that it kind of took on this form, and the backing vocals and everything came in and it turned into this ridiculously over-the-top, hilarious comedy number.”

For the record, the six-minute “United States of Eurasia” is what you might get if you crash-landed “Bohemian Rhapsody” into a Turkish bazaar and then saddled it with a theme that’s even scarier than Freddie Mercury’s ’70s-vintage harlequin-pants-and-codpiece combo. Lyrically, it’s based on Zbigniew Brzezinski’s manual for American global domination, The Grand Chessboard. (Hey, come back!)

“At the time,” Wolstenholme continues, “we were thinking, ‘This is too much,’ because we couldn’t listen to it without laughing. But then we thought, ‘Fuck it. It’s what’s come out of us. We shouldn’t hold that side of us back,’ you know?”

Bellamy echoes the bassist’s feeling that Muse has an underappreciated sense of humour, saying with a chuckle, “People probably wouldn’t know that we can see the funny side, especially with the melodrama and pushing the theatrical elements to the limit.” Anybody who watched the “making of” videos that accompanied The Resistance would have seen the band cracking itself up during the recording of “Guiding Light”, a synth-drenched breakup song that trades sensitivity for operatic mega-emotion, like a throwback to Midge Ure’s daft and pompous “Vienna”-era Ultravox.

“That was another moment when we were, like, ‘Can we allow this to go on the album?’ ” Wolstenholme admits. And then they did.

Equally unlikely, at least in terms of the band’s North American success—Muse has been enormous in Europe forever—is the sheer Britishness of what it does. “Uprising” seems to quote directly from an obscure 1974 cult item called “Rebel Rule” by Scottish glam rockers Iron Virgin, while “I Belong to You” bears a striking resemblance to the kind of spongy-sounding ’80s TV themes oozed out by English composers like Alan Hawkshaw and Ronnie Hazlehurst. (Wolstenholme says the band, which also includes drummer Dominic Howard, actually thinks the latter sounds like Cockney Rebel’s mincing 1974 U.K. hit “Mr. Soft”.) More generally, he argues that Muse’s American influences actually dominated the band, at least early on.

“When we started, we were listening to Nirvana, Rage Against the Machine, Smashing Pumpkins,” he says. “Initially, I think we were very anti-England, and it was about four months after we started this band that Kurt Cobain died. One week on the front of the NME there was ‘Rest in Peace, Nirvana’, and then the next week it was Oasis. Nothing against Oasis, but all of a sudden there was this Britpop movement which was obviously very, very British, and it was something we didn’t relate to at all. We didn’t like it in the slightest.”

From Nirvana to The Resistance. The mind boggles. What’s unequivocal about Muse’s American conquest, at least, is the role played by the live show. Aside from their miraculous chops as musicians, Bellamy and his cohorts aren’t exactly stingy with the grandeur, and the vocalist is tickled to finally export the arena experience stateside, noting: “You’re getting to see the proper show, so it finally feels like North America has caught up with everybody else.”

In the case of Muse 2010, the “proper show” includes individual collapsing tower structures for the three musicians, designed—after the album’s references to George Orwell—to look like somewhat ominous government “ministries”. The very idea shows an admirable commitment to Bellamy’s governing thematic interests. Here’s a band that uses the place where civil servants gather to make your life miserable as its central visual metaphor. Roger Waters would be proud, not to mention Terry Gilliam. In the end, it might be what makes Muse so fascinating and also so thorny to its critics. Asked about Bellamy’s lyrics, Wolstenholme bristles a little, albeit politely. He must be used to it.

“He’s probably better to comment on it than me,” the bassist says. “When we’re making music, everybody has an equal say on it. But the lyrics are the one thing that I don’t feel like anybody else has the right to make a comment about. Because it’s such a personal thing.”

Fair enough, but Wolstenholme might be ducking the issue, especially since he slips in: “I think the thing with conspiracy theory is that just because you’re interested in them, it doesn’t mean you believe them.”

Okay, he was the one who used the term. For his part, Bellamy says with a sigh, “I think it’s important to remember that’s not all the band is about. We have plenty of songs that are about other things.” Which is true. However, in the U.K. The Resistance was met with mainstream reviews that routinely praised the music and sneered at the dominant subject matter. As in—ironically enough—the Guardian smugly upbraiding Bellamy for using the phrase “thought police” in the title track, “apparently in all seriousness”. It might seem gauche to a 40-year-old Guardian critic, but why the hell wouldn’t Bellamy mention thought police in a song that’s explicitly based on 1984?

If Bellamy has promiscuously embraced some of the more lunatic fringes of the conspiracy-theory spectrum in the past—allowing the Times to fatuously dismiss the singer as a David Icke reader—then it must be said that The Resistance is refreshingly free of shape-shifting reptilians and much heavier than usual (for Muse) on reality. Reality as filtered through a synapse-frying and stratospherically over-the-top rock opera, yes, but still reality. If the album has a thematic touchstone, it’s the ferocious U2-meets-Anthrax-meets-ELP mashup “MK Ultra”, which refers to the CIA’s notorious mind-control experiments. Would the Times claim MK Ultra didn’t happen?

“The 20th century has basically been a major period of discovery of the human mind, and how the mind is easily manipulated, with images and key words, fear words, sex words,” Bellamy states. “I think the majority of people are probably unaware of how much their decision-making is influenced by hidden processes. You have to look at someone like Edward Bernays and these people who took propaganda and changed it into public relations and basically invented an industry that communicates directly with people’s animal instincts and irrational side.”

That doesn’t sound so crazy, does it? If anything, it appears that Bellamy has seized an ongoing dialogue between himself, his fans, and his critics to refine his critique of a world situation where, he says, “the inequalities are so blatantly obvious that you don’t need to talk about fringe subjects.”

He even allows that he’s “moving more toward a different kind of rhetoric”, which means we might yet hear a Muse album about the singer’s latest and less fanciful obsession with Georgism—a 19th-century economic philosophy that argues for a single tax on landowners. “Basically the idea is that if it’s a part of the Earth,” he explains, “it can’t be privately owned, and if it is privately owned, then the rest of the population must be compensated. These are the kind of issues I’m starting to think about.”

Meanwhile, a scan of its message board reveals that Muse has aroused the curiosity of a generation that has inherited an authentically Orwellian world, where illegal occupation is called “war”, the massive transfer of public wealth passes for “economic stimulus”, surveillance and torture are normal, and financially strapped governments drop millions on pervy airport scanners because of a hapless lone Nigerian with a bomb in his underpants.

As Wolstenholme says, after some gentle pushing, “Well, I think there’s a lot that’s happened in the last 10 years—like Iraq, and Afghanistan, and 9/11—that’s not been quite right, and people know that. People are sort of tuned into the fact that, ‘What the fuck’s going on?’ And I think we live in a society where the trust that we used to have has gone.”

If Muse is speaking to that, it’s probably because there’s a void. And, yes, Bellamy tends to undermine the message a little as he belts out admittedly scattershot and somewhat nebulous lyrics about the evil corporatocracy from inside a state-of-the-art laser show. Especially since it’s in partnership with Warner Music. But he’s also groping as much as any of us, and perhaps Muse is getting the ball rolling the only way it can. We should be grateful that Bellamy is setting it to such a decent tune, at least. No baby-eating lizard people necessary. Let paranoia bloom.

Muse plays at the Pacific Coliseum next Thursday (April 1).

They have said they want to come back and play LA and maybe San Diego in the fall (because they're not allowed to play there around the time of Coachella), so maybe they'll also tack on a couple of Southeastern and Midwestern US dates, since those places are not being visited on this spring leg of the tour.

Muse on the cover of the local alt-weekly! Bottom right side column for the picture.... http://www.straight.com/

Interview's here: http://www.straight.com/article-299423/vancouver/conspiracy-rock-n-roll

Rumors about October, however nothing seems definitive yet. 

They have said they want to come back and play LA and maybe San Diego in the fall (because they're not allowed to play there around the time of Coachella), so maybe they'll also tack on a couple of Southeastern and Midwestern US dates, since those places are not being visited on this spring leg of the tour.

Last night's show in Denver was unfortunately postponed due to snow on the Vail pass. The band apologise for any inconvenience this may have caused their fans and will return to Denver for a show on October 2nd.

US & CANADA TOUR AUTUMN 2010

22nd September: Viejas Arena, San Diego, CA
23rd September: Honda Center, Anaheim, CA
25th September: Staples Center, Los Angeles, CA

1st October: Santa Ana Star Center, Rio Rancho, NM
2nd October: Pepsi Center, Denver, CO
5th October: Target Center, Minneapolis, MN
6th October: Bradley Center, Milwaukee, WI
8th October: Ford Center, Oklahoma City, OK
21st October: Pepsi Coliseum, Quebec City, QC
27th October: John Paul Jones Arena, Chalottesville, VA

2nd November: Sprint Center, Kansas City, MO
3rd November: Scotttrade Center, St. Louis, MO
5th November: Value City Arena, Columbus, OH
6th November: US Bank Arena, Cincinnati, OH

Supposedly yes, in the coming days/weeks.

I had a dream they would play the Mohegan Sun, and that I took my brother along in honor of his upcoming 50th birthday.   

So when I mentioned this to him and that my dream was "a sign", his response was "Why don't you just mail me the monetary equivalent instead?" 

Sigh - he and his kids are just plain hopeless.