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I’ve never really been a huge Muse fan. I’ve respected and acknowledged that the music they made was fundamentally good but I’ve never gone out of my way to listen to a Muse album. Recently, however, someone offhandedly mentioned to me that Muse had released their 6th studio album, The 2nd Law. This led me on an aural adventure that even the Pevensies would be proud of.
While I acknowledge that I was a bit of a Muse novice, I could definitely identify a Muse song upon first listen. They are often cinematic and winding in their nature with precise and intricate composition. They are often lengthy displays of musical acuity that refuse to be played as background music and demand undivided attention. The 2nd Law, though different from its predecessors, is a Muse album at its core.
Perhaps as a sign of the times, on tracks like “Follow Me” and “The Second Law: Unsustainable” there is a dubstep influence that is, at the very least, unsettling. Though known for their big, bold, Queen inspired audio missives, this album is wedged somewhere in between a Megadeth and a Bond release—especially in the first track “Supremacy”.
It quickly unfolds, however, into a perfectly paced and clean (yet, decidedly dubby) pop song entitled “Madness” that is the textbook definition of an album single. It is dancey and catchy and gets stuck in your head the way a great Queen song does.
Muse gets funky on “Panic Station” and grandiose on “Survival”, continuing a momentum that demonstrates an unsurprising level of variety from track to track. The album begins to slow down on “Animals” only to pick back up with “Liquid State” in a show that embraces nuance but discards expectation with a Megadeth-like intro but a Foo Fighter-eqsue hook.
On a technical level, 2nd Law is nearly without flaw. It demonstrates range and a complete understanding of sound and music. The magnitude and sweep of it is faultless and is precisely what some albums (ahem, Coexist) should have been. In a word, it is Big. The only thing I would have liked to hear (and this is a small qualm, mind you) is a crazy catchy track like “Supermassive Black Hole” from their 2006 release, Black Holes and Revelations. However, I am more than satisfied with The 2nd Law and am now officially a Muse fan.
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