After the bombastic apotheosis of 2007's two-night stand at the new Wembley Stadium, Muse had two options. Either retreat into their shell and record that acoustic set of 19th-century West Country folk songs, or continue along the trajectory laid out for them by the wilfully apocalyptic Black Holes & Revelations - ie to infinity and beyond. While it's no surprise that Muse have chosen the latter course, the wholeheartedness with which this album hurls itself into the abyss of cod-symphonic astral pretension is to be commended.The Resistance's bold flight from the constraints of human reason takes a little while to get up to warp speed. Uprising - the album's first single - is a deceptively conventional glitter-stomp melange of the Dr Who theme and Blondie's Call Me. Next up, the title track posits a theoretically grisly but in practice quite palatable hybrid of U2 and David Guetta. But it's only after Undisclosed Desires has offered Depeche Mode the chance to beef up New Life with an extra disco twist that hyper-space really beckons.
Forsaking the subtle understatement of Knights of Cydonia for something a little more, well, out there, United States of Eurasia blasts schoolroom memories of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four through the filter of Bohemian Rhapsody with a brazenness that would make Mika blush. And while the "political" dimension to Matt Bellamy's lyrics owes more to David Icke than it does to Noam Chomsky, the transcendent absurdity of Muse's music is actually the perfect complement to the half-arsed internet conspiracy theories that seem to be his intellectual staple diet.
As the second half of The Resistance proceeds - through a lizard-worshipping thrash metal re-write of Lay All Your Love on Me (Unnatural Selection), to the closing Exogenesis, a three-part, 13-minute "symphony", which triumphantly realises a vision of classical music first outlined by Bruno from Fame - the essentially contradictory nature of its grandiose vision becomes ever more apparent. The foundation stones of Muse's musical edifice are the monolithic oeuvres of Abba, Queen and Rush while a quest for the band's real philosophical or architectural touchstones would probably lead you towards Ayn Rand and Albert Speer. But does this incipiently authoritarian source material necessarily invalidate Matt Bellamy's claim to be making a bold stand against "the corporate-ocracy"?
It should do really. But the same stubborn spark of unreason which insists on the right of a major label album release to retain such a deluded view of its own revolutionary potential has been the agent of many a historic conflagration. 4/5
