Muse - Simulation Theory

I was kind of debating talking about this one or not, but I figured it’s worth at least a few quick thoughts. It’s not a metal album, but whatever. Here it goes, just my quick thoughts on it.

If there’s one thing I can commend Muse for, it’s that they have always been a go-big-or-go-home kind of band, and they pretty much always opt to go big. Even if they venture into something they should have stayed at home and away from, I can at least appreciate how much they commit to whatever they’ve mission they set out on. They started their career emulating the alternative rock made popular in the 90′s by bands like Radiohead (a comparison the band have still not been able to shake somehow) with albums like Showbiz and the more fully realized Absolution, but they have made a name for themselves by way of their theatrical levels of musical orchestration, which they took to new heights on Black Holes and Revelations and the proggy symphonic rock epic of The Resistance. The band even worked in some electronic heavier elements on 2012′s The 2nd Law, which may have been a little better received if it had not been conceived in and evidently tapping into the dubstep explosion around that time. I actually enjoy quite a bit of that album, even though it is definitely front-loaded and its lead single “Madness” was definitely overplayed at the time it came out. The band did lose me, however, with their undercooked 2015 album, Drones: an album surrounding drone surveillance and warfare that the band touted as a back-to-basics rock album. It had its moments, but it’s an album that seemed to find Muse on uneasy footing, just piling things on top of each other to magnify their sound on songs that seemed more formulaic for the band than truly bombastic. Also the constant repeating of the album’s title across the paranoid conspiracy-theory-themed lyrics was really annoying.

This year, the band decided channeling the nostalgic aesthetic of 80′s synth rock and its combination with some modern electronica was the mission they wanted to embark on, for some reason. I enjoyed the early single, “Thought Contagion”, which still found them singing their paranoid distrust of government secrecy, but it did work together a cinematic blend of backing vocals and hard rock riffage that sounded much more inspired than what characterized Drones. But Simulation Theory is still yet another patchy affair for the trio, with only a few standout cuts capturing that vital energy well while the rest falls into the trappings of an augmented nostalgia trip that finds Muse unfocused like they were on The 2nd Law again. The album starts off on a strong foot with “Algorithm”, a song whose new wave-inspired beat and dramatic string section reminds me a bit of some of the material from Ulver’s fantastic album from last year. With the big choir vocals backing Matt Bellamy’s highs, it’s an excellent, ever-compounding intro track. But the album plunges into a goofy 80’s synth beat on “The Dark Side”, which is unfortunate because I love the gothic melody of the song’s verses (it sounds a bit like something Chelsea Wolfe might write). The subsequent song “Pressure” makes use of a strangely Maiden-esque guitar riff plugged into fuzzier effects at its intro, but the corny falsetto background vocals and melody of the chorus is just so unfitting and reminiscent of the least-well-aged aspects of 80’s synth pop, and the song “Propaganda” that follows is bit of a structural mess whose only saving grace is the heavy bassy electronic (dubstep-ish) intro.

The song “Break It to Me” is another high point for the album of only for its hard-hitting warped bass guitar line and the harmonic minor vocal melody giving the song a sense of unease. The song does have a cool scratchy electronic/guitar solo that adds to the edge of its atmosphere. Unfortunately it’s followed by the cheesy-as-fuck acoustic/synth ballad “Something Human”. I can appreciate some good cheese in my music; I’m very appreciative of what Ghost does. But the cheesy 80’s vibe Muse is channeling on so many songs here doesn’t really mesh with their self-serious hypothetical existential musings or

After the single “Thought Contagion” rolls around, it’s pretty much downhill from there with the obnoxious vocal sampling and overly sentimental synth pop of “Get up and Fight” whose 2000’s emo alt. Rock chorus comes out of nowhere and makes no sense between the song’s poppy verses. Then there’s the dragging call-and-response of “Blockades”, and the horribly boring vocal melodies in both the verses and the choruses and the unimaginative dubstep bass (clearly taken from “Madness”) of “Dig Down”. The song does have an overarching build-up, but the payoff is hardly worth even the short time the song takes up. The album ends on a particularly anticlimactic note with the brooding synth ambiance of “The Void”, which is hardly as enveloping as the band probably felt it to be in the studio and isn’t quite the conclusion this album needed.

While I do prefer this album slightly over Drones (which isn’t saying much), Simulation Theory suffers a bit from the same formulaic writing and over-dependence on the hugeness of the band’s sound, which has found the band’s creative output slowly going stale, and seemingly unnecessarily as the band show that they still have their writing chops about them when they do manage to come through with the occasional highlight on an album. This album feels kind of like a retro downgrade of The 2nd Law, but with even fewer standout tracks. At least the first half of that album is genuinely consistently fantastic. This one though, only has three songs and a couple of decent moments toward the beginning that I really enjoyed. It seems like Muse just unloaded their usual symphonic arsenal onto a different style this time around, and stayed within their usual compositional bubble when a writing process with a greater attention to the appeal of 80’s synth rock might have benefited the album greatly. They go big again, but just on the usual stuff. It doesn’t seem like they went big on the deeper aspects of the style they dumped their theatrics into. Simulation Theoryis big on the aesthetic, but deficient in its composition.