QUICK SPINS: Green Day, Muse
By Tankboy in Arts & Entertainment on Oct 10, 2012 5:40PM
Green Day's last two albums have seen the band taking their punk rock roots and blowing them into Broadway sized ambitions. Literally. Their first rock opera American Idiot became a bona fide hit on Broadway, but more importantly it saw the group executing that while perfectly creating vibrant music that didn't betray the band's true personality. The follow up, 21st Century Breakdown, sagged a little under its own weight, but still managed to turn out a number of terrific songs. So it's not surprising that the group's ambition continued to grow, seeing them follow that up with a trilogy of albums released in quick succession. The first, ¡Uno!, is out and while it's bookended with a grand concept of massive musical output, it's songs see the band returning to less complicated roots as the band re-embraces their less cerebral side.
This is being heralded as a return to the band's initial glory days in the mid-'90s when Dookie blasted across the pop landscape seeding its punk, flourishing in later years in malls everywhere as younger band's sucked down their formula. But ¡Uno! is not Dookie. It couldn't be. That earlier album was created by a couple snobby twenty-somethings and the new one os coming from men in their forties. What ends up happening is that Billie Joe Armstong, Mike Dirnt and Tre Cool are able to trot out their formidable songwriting chops, and amazing ear for hooks that come off as uncomplicated and effortless but burrow deep anyway, to create an album that's imminently sing-along-able. Just whatever you do don't pay attention to the lyrics you're singing along to because Armstrong is beyond the years where teen angst comes off as believable. But we've got to be honest with you, we don't care about that one whit. After such a strong early catalog, and an astounding late career leap into true musical and lyrical respectability, we're willing to allow Green Day an album that just sounds good when you turn it way up.
We've always appreciated Muse frontman Matthew Bellamy's oversized opinion of himself and his band. While much of the band's early output came off as Radiohead-lite it was a really well written execution of that particular blueprint. While it took the group a number of years to really dig into U.S. soil their fame elsewhere across the globe only furthered to fuel Bellamy's ambition. And by the time Black Holes and Revelations came out in the mid-aughts Muse had perfected their mixture of epic pop that American's finally caved under the weight of the unstoppable single "Starlight" and gave the band their due. Which was maybe not great thing, because Muse grew even more emboldened and followed that up an album that crumbled under its own grossly overextended expectations of grandeur, The Resistance.
So we approached the recently released The 2nd Law with no small amount of trepidation, which wasn't helped by the band's preceding it with "Survival," the hilariously overwrought song commissioned as the official song for the London 2012 Olympics. And sure enough the album opens with "Supremacy," which ends up sounding like the theme to a James Bond movie we hope never gets made. Aside from Radiohead, the band's other biggest influence is probably Queen, but while Queen created oversized rock and/or roll, their collective tongues were planted firmly in cheek. However it appears Bellamy's tongue can't even find his cheek. Heck, we're not entirely certain he's aware his cheek even exists at this point. So we were caught entirely off guard by the next track, "Madness," which reveals a lithesome and lovely pulsating side of the band. Next up is "Panic Station," a rock disco number that adds in equal parts roller-rink, TOP horns and hair metal falsetto. Yeah, that sounds ridiculous on paper but it sounds awesome on your speakers. And the album continues on in a pattern of unpredictability. Bellamy seems to have realized that he can smear his grandiose notions all over any number of musical genres, and it provides a larger canvas that allows him to overindulge to his heart's content while still keeping things fun and listenable.
In the end that's all we've every wanted from Muse. It's impossible to take the band seriously on any emotional level, but on The 2nd Law Bellamy and his crew have finally figured out how to accomplish the balancing act to deliver epic tunes that manager to teeter over the threat of submerging themselves in bloat without ever drowning in it. Which is to say the band has finally delivered an album that sounds to be finally true to their own nature that is a helluva lot of fun to listen to over and over again.