The 2nd Law (Remastered) Muse

• 1Supremacy04:55
• 2Madness04:40
• 3Panic Station03:04
• 4Prelude00:57
• 5Survival04:17
• 6Follow Me03:51
• 7Animals04:23
• 8Explorers05:47
• 9Big Freeze04:40
• 10Save Me05:09
• 11Liquid State03:03
• 12The 2nd Law: Unsustainable03:48
• 13The 2nd Law: Isolated System05:00
• Total Runtime53:34

Info for The 2nd Law (Remastered)

Somebody in Hollywood should put Muse out of their misery and make a sequel to Flash Gordon. It’s the soundtrack the band were put on earth to write, perfectly combining their likeably grandiose devotion to all things stagy, sci fi and, of course, Queen shaped. For the spectres of Queen’s hits flap boldly – like Brian Blessed’s hackmen – through the songs on the Teignmouth trio’s sixth album.

The first single – Madness – is the most overt example and also the most successful. Set to an icy cool bass line that vibrates like rocket thrusters in zero gravity, it’s a strangely suspended melodic and lyrical play on Queen’s I Want to Break Free (with a stuttering, cyber-undercurrent of A Kind of Magic). But whereas Freddie was singing about a desire to escape a partner’s self-satisfied lies, Matt Bellamy is calling a lover back to him, admitting fault: “Come on and rescue me. Yes I know, I can be wrong.”

Bellamy’s airy vocal is pitched somewhere between Mercury’s punchy conviction and Bono’s widescreen searching: he’s a man who’s found what he was looking for. The guitar solo is pure Brian May, but the song has got its own propulsive soulfulness and it works. And the more I listened to this record, the more I figured out how Muse have managed to sell 15million records. They hurl together like meteorites lots of big, chunkily familiar influences from across a galaxy of genres, then set them spinning in an ever-so-slightly off kilter orbit for a few giddy minutes.

A cursory glance at my notepad reveals that – Queen hits aside – I picked up references to INXS, the White Stripes, Radiohead and Led Zeppelin, Lloyd Webber musicals, Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No 1, Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive, Jean Michel Jarre’s use of bombastic choirs who sound like they’re singing from the rooftops of falling skyscrapers and Badfinger’s classic power ballad Without You. There are also apocalyptic lyrics, fetal heart beats and intoned details of the second law of thermodynamics.

More interestingly, for a proggy act, there’s a healthy dose of funk, making this a rare example of danceable prog rock. The disco feel of Panic Station – which nods at INXS’s Suicide Blonde, Queen’s Another One Bites the Dust, David Bowie’s Fame and Prince’s Kiss — ends up sounding a bit like a Scissor Sisters number.

Muse’s rather absurd spaceship may be welded together from bits of other acts – but it still flies. (Helen Brown, The Telegraph)

Matthew Bellamy, vocals, Guitar, keyboards
Christopher Wolstenholme, bass, vocals
Dominic Howard, drums, percussion

No biography found.

This album contains no booklet.