If there’s anything Muse truly nail here, it’s at last embracing just the right amount of camp-not an easy skill for earnest bands to pick up on the fly, as U2 and the Arcade Fire have proven. A damn dobro even rises from the digital belches and fingersnaps of the former, with Bellamy doing his best Tom Morello impression before he overdubs a theremin. “Propaganda” and “Break it to Me” veer frighteningly close to the monogenre pop that has crowded out guitar music on rock playlists, except Bellamy still believes in solos. The sequencers on “Algorithm” are on loan from any number of post- Chromatics opportunists, but none of them would actually add a real string section like Muse. This is a band that has given up on trying to look cool to most anyone, so Muse do here what they have always done and likely will always do-throw money at their latest fancy with the indiscriminate, earnest taste of a teenage boy.
“Propaganda” conflates a seductive woman with a totalitarian surveillance state otherwise, these are the trite warnings of paranoid androids who have already made albums called Drones and The Resistance. That notion of swapped parts applies to the politics of Simulation Theory, too. If need be, Muse can simply replace them. What once were string-tapping solos or tripled-tracked riffs are now sequencers, because it’s not enough for Muse to share festival stages with S U R V I V E or M83. The fluorescent howler “The Dark Side” could’ve easily been called “The Upside Down,” so credit Muse for showing some restraint. Because they are Muse, they can get “Stranger Things”’ Kyle Lambert to design the cover and throw in some blatant visual cues to Drive and Tron. They get the lesser-known of Los Angeles’ major college marching bands to play on the alternate version of “Pressure”-that it’s a highlight for UCLA says more about their current football team than the song itself.Īnd what’s more in line with this decade’s prevailing commercial trends than rebooting the least-obscure IP as something more shiny and self-aware? People will enjoy Simulation Theory because it’s essentially Ready Player One on wax, its techno-dystopian plot merely a piñata for pop culture nuggets that spill out on slightest contact.
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Leave it to Muse to discover Fleetwood Mac in 2018 and go straight for Tusk. The airy backing track of “Get Up and Fight” could pass for Balearic pop or a Sweetener outtake, while those whoa-ohs during state-of-the-art guitarless rocker “Thought Contagion” should be of great interest to both satellite radio providers and Imagine Dragons’ copyright lawyers. The song then becomes an uncanny homage to George Michael. “Something Human” requires using Muse and trop house in the same sentence, at least until the acoustic guitars arrive. Simulation Theory is another deliberate pivot into the present. Like Coldplay but without the advantage of rapper cosigns, they’ve moved from “Radiohead if they still played alt-rock” to “Radiohead if they got into EDM.” They’ve produced two solid decades of singles that are enjoyable enough when divorced from the insufferable political significance or higher intelligence they use as filler for their full-lengths.
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Bellamy’s megawatt vocals and vague platitudes about breaking free and overcoming something or another: There is little functional difference between Muse and “Fight Song,” especially since most people encounter them in four-minute chunks on corporate radio, anyway. Production from Rich Costey, Shellback, Mike Elizondo, and even Timbaland.