Album review: Muse, The 2nd Law
Muse
The 2nd Law
Warner Brothers, £12.99
* * * * *
Then there is the ultimate bedroom mirror persona, with multiple opportunities for shredding the tennis racket in an air guitar frenzy.
Explorers is a ghostly imprint of a Brian May tune, swelling from the modestly polite into a controlled West End crescendo.
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Hide AdWriggling free of those gentle constraints to weep and wail is Animals, which captures the pomposity of U2 until a splendidly bonkers guitar break rips that façade apart while chasing down the fade.
Survival wears its Olympic status proudly and perhaps a bit too loudly, while Follow Me shares some of the defiance of Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive, mashed with some Bono-like, angst-ridden “whoa whoa’s”.
Tales of the title track embracing dubstep miss the mark – this is more akin to “everything but the kitchen sink” step.
Opening tune Supremacy is a whirlpool of James Bond themes, in particular the N64 version of Goldeneye, with some Mariachi brass melting down for good measure.
Record-making on a gargantuan scale, which sometimes neglects the devil demanded by the detail.
Colin Somerville
Download this: Supremacy, Animals