Neo-progsters Muse have spent their entire career attempting to recreate the final 20 minutes of 2001: A Space Odyssey in musical form. Following a series of overblown false starts and Radiohead pastiches, they finally came close with 2006’s Black Holes And Revelations, an album heady with sci-fi silliness, Da Vinci Code mysticism and songs about time travelling knights. It was a bone-fide blockbuster, propelling Muse, once notable for being huge in Russia and mid-league everywhere else, to Wembley Stadium-filling international superstardom.
But it’s taken until now for the Devon threesome to truly achieve blast off and spin into proggy high-orbit. Recorded in Milan, and making gratuitous use of a 40-piece orchestra, The Resistance is Blackholes... super-sized, loaded up with human growth hormones and gilded with filigree. It’s bigger, badder, dafter and, at moments, so ludicrous you have no choice but to take it seriously, if only because, well, any group that concludes a record with a three-part ‘song cycle’ entitled ‘Exogenesis Symphony Parts I – III’, couldn’t actually be taking the piss, right?
Amidst the sci-fi operatics and L.Ron Hubbard-overtones, critiquing individual tracks feels almost superfluous – The Resistance is all about the grand sweep, the cosmic wide-shot. Nonetheless, there’s lots here to woo devotees and nonbelievers alike, starting with the Depeche Mode rumble of the opener ‘Uprising’, wherein Matt Bellamy croons something ridiculous over a chrome-plated glam riff. It sounds like Nine Inch Nails covering ‘Spirit In The Sky’ while nukes reign down and the result is a moment of beautiful, breathtaking absurdity (Christ knows how outrageous it’s going to sound in concert).
Further electro excess tinges ‘Resistance’, the closest the LP gets to a ‘Supermassive Black Hole’-style funk curve-ball, whilst the falsetto-driven ‘Guiding Light’ and ‘Unnatural Selection’ suggest Rufus Wainwright trapped inside Jeff Wayne’s War Of The Worlds, with Bellamy howling and shrieking as huge glittering synthscapes crash and burn in the background.
Lyrically, Muse are still spewing out reheated David Icke-isms and tin-hat paranoia. ‘MK Ultra’ addresses Britain’s culture of surveillance, though it’s hard to take this sort of political critique at face value when it’s couched in a cyberpunk re-write of ‘Ride Of The Valkyries’; ‘United States Of Eurasia’ references American plans for global domination and reminds you of Gary Numan during his S&M phase. Short of actually rigging a Rickenbacker piano with explosives and detonating it during the squalling outro, it’s hard to think how the song could be any more over the top (though if you give them half a minute, Muse will surely have a few ideas).
However, it’s the closing triptych of quasi-classical numbers – the aforementioned ‘Exogenesis’ sequence – that transports Muse to a place beyond parody. Against a backdrop of swelling French horns, lumbering tympani and strings straight out of the Lord Of The Rings score, Bellamy beats up his ivories and screeches sweet nothing – for 14 uninterrupted minutes. It’s the land that irony forgot and – who’d have guessed it? – the view from up here is pretty good.