Muse – Black Holes and Revelations (2006)

Like I said in the previous post about a Muse album, I used to be really impressed by Muse's music back in the day, but nowadays I don't really listen to it at all anymore. Where I actually really liked Absolution back in the day, I remember that when Black Holes and Revelations first came out, I already kind of thought it wasn't that good anymore. I did, however, like a couple of individual songs from the album and ended up buying it on a CD because I happened to find it cheap somewhere. Thinking back to that time, I think I mainly bought it because of the song Knights of Cydonia. Muse has probably always been a very big sounding band aiming to play big stadiums, but on this album, I feel like they lost the last bits of being an alternative rock band and they just became a stadium rock band with huge sounds.



I'll be forever glad that I got to see Muse after their Absolution album in Helsinki at a venue for only 1,000 people. Afterwards, nothing like that would ever be possible anymore. Also, the albums after Absolution weren't nearly as good anymore and I personally also grew out of this kind of music. Black Holes and Revelations has a couple of good songs, but the overall sound is over-bloated chunk of stadium rock that doesn't give enough room for the more intimate tones of Bellamy's vocals, that are the most striking feature of the band.

The album starts with a growing space synth song Take a Bow. The composition of this song is very poor and the organ sounds do not impress after hearing similar stuff on four previous albums already. Starlight is the first real song on the album. It is an instant hit song with catchy piano riff in the beginning. The sounds are really polished and they grow into huge measures that can really fill the whole stadium. I'm slightly annoyed by the fact that everything in this song sounds so calculated. Supermassive Black Hole was a hit song right when the album came out. I remember seeing this song on MTV and thinking that now Muse's momentum is definitely over. I didn't like this song at all. It lacked all of that spacey melodic songwriting that had made their couple of first albums good. This was definitely something new from the band, but there's really nothing positive about this song. Map of the Problematique, on the other hand, is quite an interesting song. In place of guitars and space organs, there's a kind of techno beat with electronic samples. I may not personally be much of a fan of this kind of music, but at least this is something new that kind of fits in with Muse's sounds. Soldier's Poem sounds a lot like Unintended from their first album, but the song just leaves you a bit cold. The second half of the album is filled with kind of boring rock songs, until we get to Knights of Cydonia. This song draws influences from Ennio Morricone's Western-films. It's like a space version of The Good the Bad and the Ugly soundtrack. The music video for this song further emphasises this connection. This was the song that made me buy this album. The album ends with probably the worst song on the album, Glorious.

I don't have anything against stadium rock bands per se, but I just feel like, often, becoming very big, bands lose their touch with intimate and personal topics and songs start feeling a bit less personal, distancing the band from its listeners. I feel like this definitely happened with Muse on this album. Also, extensive radio-play results in a counter-reaction. Hearing the same songs over and over again in public really makes me not want to hear those songs anymore in my own home. This is probably not what the record companies and radio stations have in mind when they're creating playlists, but at least for me personally, it has this kind of effect.

Listen to the album on Spotify.