Muse Adds Chicago Date To Their Hotly Anticipated World Tour
By Tankboy in Arts & Entertainment on Nov 9, 2015 4:45PM
Muse, photo by Danny Clinch
We've been watching dates slowly get added to Muse's ‘The Drones World Tour,’ and growing slowly more agitated as Chicago kept being absent from that itinerary. Thankfully, the band just announced they will be performing on Jan. 13 at the United Center. Tickets go on sale this Friday.
Muse has traveled a long road since their launch as a "Radiohead-lite" soundalike in the late '90s. Frontman Matthew Bellamy's an ambitious artist so he spent most of the aughts pushing the band's more operatic sounds towards the rafters, building Muse into one of the most popular bands in the world while doing so. Bellamy manages to mix catchy hooks with his more prog-rock inclinations, and crafted an impressive run of albums cresting with 2006's Black Holes and Revelations, arguably the band's strongest album, and finest distillation of the group's commercial and artistic prowess working in tandem.
In our opinion Muse artistically stumbled with 2010's The Resistance, and 2012's The 2nd Law was an uneven affair, even though both albums saw the band grow ever larger popular acclaim. Muse's stage shows grew ever more epic to match the further excesses within their music, and when they headlined Lollapalooza in 2011 even we had to admit the live spectacle was truly worth it.
On Drones, released earlier this year, the band has curtailed the self-indulgence and increased the focus on tighter songs. This means that on this tour the band will be backing an LP that sees them playing to their strengths, increasing our anticipation of seeing the new work live along with a selection of their back catalog.
The show is being presented in the round. The description given by the band that the "stage design and configuration will give fans a true 360 degree audio/visual sensory experience" leads us to think it might be something similar to the set-up explored by U2 on their most recent tour. Whatever the configuration, we think this is one of the tours everyone will be talking about.
Muse will play on Jan. 13, 2016 at The United Center at 7:30 p.m.
Reserved tickets range from $39.50 to $69.50, and main floor general admission is $69.50 and can be purchased online, by phone at 800-745-3000, or at the United Center box office this Friday, Nov. 13 at 10 a.m.
It also appears there is a fan club pre-sale starting this Wednesday, but you need to have already been a fan club member to access that. There is also a VIP pre-sale on Thursday, so if we find out more information on how to access that we will update this post.