It's Not Right but It's Ok (Showbiz - Muse)

Member Name: Lightholler

Product:	Showbiz - Muse
Date:	14/03/01 (20 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Originality and rock n' roll still do meet occasionaly.

Disadvantages: They never meet for long enough.

UK inkies have been getting all in a tizzy ome time now over Devon’s ‘Muse’, and amid all this praise they featured in almost every end of 1999 ‘Readers Poll’ as best new band. Also, along with the likes of Mansun and Placebo, they have attracted a lot of old school Manic Street Preacher fans who have become disillusioned with the commercial bloatedness of the taff-rock kingpins. So it was with great anticipation that the ‘Sunburn’ arrived in March/April of last year.

The song opens with soft-spoken swirling pianos and slowly builds to the, sadly, inevitable classic rock out, doom and gloom chorus. “But where’s the love?’ I hear you ask. The answer is that there is none, and rightly so. Matt Bellamy’ plaintiff voice was built purely with the end of the world in mind There can’t be many West Country Worzel Gummidge types whose voice lets us know so forcefully that when the woman in question “burns like the sun” she is cooking him to a crisp rather than giving him a nice tan. Then there’s the guitar solo as a huge, choppy apocalyptic noise.

Underneath all this Chris Wolstenholme’s rolling bassline, which plays roughly the same as a goalkeeper in a football team. It doesn’t stand on its own, but if it weren’t there you would really miss it.

In short, if you like your queasy listening infused with a little more intensity than the usual, pretentious “boo-bloody-hoo I’m in such pain” rubbish then Muse might just be the answer to your prayers, but to be honest, Ireland’s JJ72 do the same thing slightly better.

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