Muse’s Matthew Bellamy at Valley View Casino Center. Photo: David Hall, for the Register. Click for more.
There’s a fine line every arena-level act must traverse, with career-threatening pitfalls on either side of the high-wire that can swallow reputations whole. Fall one way and lapse into too much mass-appeal production, losing distinctive identity by forsaking what got a group to such status in the first place. Fall the other way and you can wind up drowning in self-indulgence, denying audiences the pleasures they paid for in favor of dredging up deep cuts or directing your display too inwardly.
It’s rougher for rockers. Pop stars can get away with hyper-stylized performance-art murder for the length of a rom-com so long as they open and close with hits. But bands – like Muse, the exceedingly talented English trio that kicked off its latest North American tour Monday night at Valley View Casino Center in San Diego ahead of three shows at Staples Center – face a peculiarly intensive scrutiny the bigger they become.
That’s been the case since before Led Zeppelin prowled the earth, and it’s been a poisonous thorn in the side of the best groups, from indestructible giants (U2 circa Pop) to collapsing cult heroes (the Replacements with Don’t Tell a Soul). All bands must evolve to remain viable artistic forces, especially once they reach the half-dozen album mark, as Muse did with last year’s somewhat polarizing effort The 2nd Law. Yet even the slightest shifts in style are guaranteed to bring heaps of scorn.
Whereas pop lovers tend to race forward, sometimes blindly so, in hungry pursuit of new flavors, rock fans often get entrenched in (I’d say trapped by) reasons why they initially fell in love with a band, dismissing experimentation until years after the results have become established style. Metallica’s self-titled Black Album, for instance, we all take for granted as a monster classic, but we forget how many original fans positively despised that record from the moment they heard “Enter Sandman.” To them, it was sell-out heresy.
Because The 2nd Law dabbles in dubstep (how dare they!) and occasionally funks up the joint like frontman Matthew Bellamy caught an infection from Prince, Muse has been battling back a similar attitude from hardcore devotees since dropping the disc in September. Meanwhile, just like Metallica back then – and much to the chagrin of Gollums who wished the band had stayed precious forever – Muse’s musical advances have garnered ever more flabbergasting spikes in ticket sales.
A decade ago, when these guys were barely on the radar and getting teased as Radiohead rip-offs, nobody who saw the merits in Bellamy’s virtuosic fretwork and the sturdy girding of bassist Christopher Wolstenholme and drummer Dominic Howard would have predicted their rapid rise to Coldplay level these past few years. Instead, they caught on about the time “Viva la Vida” was inescapable on radio – and suddenly Rock Nation woke up and realized how astonishingly powerful they can be, particularly when given massive canvases to paint.
They are that rare outfit I prefer savoring on a grand scale than seeing stripped of spectacle at the Troubadour. Muse excels amid excess without getting excessive musically, no matter how grandiose they strive to be.
Monday night’s display, slightly less impressive than the glittering hydraulic towers they conceived for the 2009-10 tour behind “The Resistance,” was nonetheless mesmerizing again and again. Many of its ideas – chiefly a lowering pyramid of digital screens made to look like old Zeniths, later inverted into a cone that engulfs the group – seem recycled from two U2 outings, ZooTV and the 360 Tour. Yet such magnetic visual chaos, shining most brilliantly whenever a stellar laser array was added, suits songs that are similarly sweeping in scope and emotionally inspirational, albeit heavier on doomsday survival and titanic romance.
Do they sometimes sound a lot like U2 to match looking like U2? Of course, and why shouldn’t they borrow?
Muse’s Dominic Howard at Valley View Casino Center. Photo: David Hall, for the Register. Click for more.
What has emerged in the time since Black Holes and Revelations (2006) and its spectral smash “Starlight” lifted these Brits out of mid-level opening-act hell in America – when they went from filling Honda Center to headlining Coachella almost instantly – is a truth Muse’s true believers knew all along: This is another major entry in the ongoing history of epic rock bands from the other side of the Atlantic.
What sets them apart, increasing exponentially since third album Absolution (2003), is how they aim to amalgamate. They won’t be the end of the English line, but they play like they are, paying homage to forebears from Zep (obviously so on the “Kashmir”-y stomp and wail of “Supremacy”) to Queen (too many selections to name) to, yes, Radiohead (“Time Is Running Out” is manna for people who lost interest after Kid A).
What gripes me isn’t that they’ve waded into the latest electronic pools or gone Hollywood, by which I mean The 2nd Law was recorded in and influenced by life in L.A., not that Bellamy has a child with Kate Hudson. My problem is the same I’ve had lately with the Black Keys and Kings of Leon and even Coldplay: Why isn’t Muse playing epic-length shows, delving into all corners of its catalog, to match such mammoth staging?
The San Diego opener was riveting, remarkably played – and also programmatic and over way too soon. By 9:20, after only an hour, they were headed into the home stretch, leaving three big guns (“Uprising,” “Starlight” and “Survival”) for the finish. A few ticks past 10 I was on my way back to the car – whereas I’d be standing for another 90 minutes at a Springsteen show, and he’s twice their age.
Lady Gaga, who has two albums and an EP, startled for nearly 2½ hours in the same room Muse takes over this week. They have three times as much material as her yet aren’t likely to dig any deeper than they did down south, spotlighting “Bliss” from second album Origin of Symmetry (1999). Since launching in Europe the set list for this tour has remained mostly unchanged, just minor tweaks for cities with multiple dates.
When you have snarky haters who could be silenced with a handful of older tracks, that approach makes no sense. Nor does tidying up the show’s flow, rather than letting loose the retro joy of the last tour, when Bellamy would lead full-blown classic-rock vamps between songs, just because.
Used to be that when you got this big, your shows got longer – check with Pearl Jam. More so than October’s arena run from the Black Keys, who have as many albums but whose songs are shorter, I expected Muse to go all out, frenzy fans old and new with everything they’re currently delivering plus quite a bit extra. (Where was “United States of Eurasia”? Why not “New Born” and “Stockholm Syndrome”? Or anything from Showbiz?)
Instead, no matter how awesome the sight, it felt like they were hitting marks, even when Bellamy dropped to his knees for slides. Pick any night you want to see them at Staples, it won’t make a difference. What they’re providing is superbly executed, visually stunning and entirely by-the-numbers. They’re capable of more.
Muse, with Band of Skulls opening, plays Jan. 23-24 and 26 at Staples Center, $35-$69.50.
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Live review: Muse heads to Staples Center after awesome but fleeting opener in San Diego is a post from: Soundcheck