Hello minions, as you can see my good friend Brian posted his first review on Side Meier's Civilization V, and I'm impressed to say the least. I can expect to see good content coming from him in the near future, but as for Carl and Will...meh. I have yet to see what they can do, but let's not give them the benefit of the doubt.
So as not to be 1-upped, I'd like to post a review of The Second Law by Muse, which I found leaked on a super obscure website (don't tell anyone, not that you would know anyway). I downloaded this last night while engaging in gentlemanly activities at Brian's house, and we sat in the parlor enjoying fine wine and other drinks of class while listening to this admittedly shitty quality file. However, it was legit (as legit as 128 k/s can be) and Brian and I suffered through this audiophile's nightmare.
All I have to say is...eh. Sound quality aside, it was just typical musecore bs. Now I didn't have high expectations coming into this, knowing that it was going to be a dubstep album, thinking to myself "Don't let Muse get sucked into this fad", so it wouldn't have taken much to impress me, but it still didn't. Let me just judge the album as a whole instead of giving you a song-by-song breakdown: it tried too hard to be dramatic and deep, while still trying too hard to incorporate catchy dubby melodies and choruses, while Matthew Bellamy also tried to show off his sexy voice by including way too much vibrato.
Absolution and Origin of Symmetry were intense and almost perfect in every way, but it seems that Muse has lost it's sense of subtlety, and the novelty wore off as Muse tried the same tactics over and over for it's recent albums. The Resistance marked it's downward spiral into mediocrity as the members ran out of creativity and the spark that created wonders like Showbiz and Black Holes and Revelations. It's past it's prime, and I think Muse knows this, which is why it tried to take it's music in a new direction by appealing to the dubstep-loving demographic. I can respect them for trying to be experimental, but they still hung onto the same cliches and drawn out choruses that build up into nothing that they were known for, which is why this album still resembles all of the others.
Madness, the radio single off of this album, is hardly a good representation of it as a whole. Personally, both me and Brian loved the funky Panic Station, which Brian affectionately referred to it as a "Thriller clone", but I didn't see much of a resemblance. I think he ate a bad taco or something. Anyway, I'm loving the funk rock roots that Muse has decided to incorporate within a few of the songs, but I don't like that they included way too many other roots as well. If you look on the wikipedia page, here's the list of genres that the 2nd Law attempts to exhibit: Alternative rock, new prog, electronic rock, progressive metal, brostep. If I had just heard of Muse and then read that list of genres, I would have said to myself: "I already hate it." Honestly, I think they were just throwing ideas around of what to call their album, but really it's just a cacophony of half-assed ideas and unfulfilled ambitions. Truly an experimental album.
However, like any other Muse album, there's always something that draws my attention, and that's the soft and sleepy string sections, that somehow also sound foreboding and climactic. That part of Muse I really like, so I was excited to hear it in songs like Animals and Explorers, which reminded me of happy lullabies that gave me hope for the future. If nothing else, Muse gives you a sense of hope and jubilance, which is always appreciated by people who need motivation and encouragement. The rest of the album was filler, and Survival was made especially for the London Olympics, so I don't even count that money-maker as part of the album. Supremacy was a mediocre opener, and the two 2nd Law songs were an average to okay closer, if a bit pretentious for expecting me to explode with awe at how epic their music is by including crescendos every 10 seconds.
I give this album a 6.5 out of 10. Even though it seems I detracted on it a lot, I'm really just complaining about the dubstep and lack of originality, which I try not to include in my official rating because it brings the rating to a more subjective level, which I try to avoid. I gave it points for going into an uncomfortable direction for the sake of experimentation, the fun and funky grooves, and soft strings and piano numbers that I always loved about Muse. Although the tunes were a little off for me, someone else can always find pleasure in Muse's upbeat and pseudo-revolutionary music.
Tracklist:
1. Supremacy
2. Madness
3. Panic Station
4. Prelude
5. Survival
6. Follow Me
7. Animals
8. Explorers
9. Big Freeze
10. Save Me
11. Liquid State
12. The 2nd Law: Unsustainable
13. The 2nd Law: Isolated System
Sample Track- Madness:
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