Muse’s debut, Showbiz, tried the self-serious angst thing, too. Across the pond, grunge had transformed goofball rock into lucrative torment, unloosing a glut of disaffected Nirvana clones. Their radio A-list forebears were the mannered realists of kitchen-sink Britpop, whose fetish for authenticity had awakened an everyman army of Coldplays and Travises. Origin of Symmetry’s mercurial range honors those dueling emotions: in “Space Dementia”’s barbarian opera, “Feeling Good”’s benevolent vaudeville, “Bliss”’s Nintendo-prog fantasia, “Plug in Baby”’s widdly licks. By combining goth vulnerability with sci-fi scale and hard-rock drama, it captures a paradox of young romance: On one hand, Bellamy sounds wracked with despair, but he proclaims his heartbreak with the glee of an ecstatic preacher. Origin of Symmetry romanticizes a time when pop was primal, titanic, and camp. But nor would they nail adolescence with such panache as they do on their second LP. Muse themselves never stopped being teenagers, happiest whipping up us-versus-them screeds and epic expansions of boyish obsessions.
The album’s cult has endured not so much by converting new fans as by presenting a pungent memory box.
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To legions of longhair disciples, Origin of Symmetry sounded a final alarm before the tractor beam of domesticity beckoned, promising annual trips to Download Fest and pet cats curled up in Korn hoodies. For at least the next decade, slapdash “Plug in Baby” covers blasted from provincial pub stages, anointing a new mainstay on the popular front of radio rock. The album soundtracked a pipeline out of outsiderdom for suburban students and scruffy skate kids-the next generation of techno gourmands and bong-ripping metalheads, math-rock nerds and hardcore loyalists. Where Is This It, released two weeks later, garnered the Strokes a coalition of hedonists and neurotics drawn to the big city, Origin of Symmetry positioned Muse as an outpost of Radiohead’s broad church of the alienated. Their province back home transpired not to be London (too jaded and skeptical) but rather in pockets of smalltown and middle Britain, where latent ambition and stifled bombast can thrive among thwarted romantics. Wow, yes, I thought, frowning seriously into my lunchbox.įormed in the seaside town of Teignmouth, Muse signed their first deal in 1998 in Los Angeles, before amassing a giant fanbase in continental Europe. “Space dementia in your eyes/And peace will arise and tear us apart,” Bellamy sang, machines clipping his voice to a slithery alien rasp. In the meantime, I listened to Origin of Symmetry as if to a documentary. My sense they were overblown-that scaling the heights of psychic tumult might not require galactic pomp and an actual jetpack-would take a few years to kick in. Muse were playing melodrama as teenage realism, an extremely, ridiculously honest noise. Origin of Symmetry depicts life as the school-friend trio of Bellamy, bassist Chris Wolstenholme, and drummer Dom Howard saw it: a war zone where tyrant guitars and drums vie for space with balletic miniatures and stargazing synths. Before his myriad quirks congealed into lovable schtick, and arena floodlights greeted Muse’s rebirth as prog-pop conspiracists, the band released a pair of fascinating LPs: 2003’s pop opus Absolution and their 2001 space odyssey, the formidable Origin of Symmetry. To straddle the sincere and absurd, the real and fake, was never a stretch for a man who did not resemble his straight-faced Britrock contemporaries so much as the swaggering peacocks of ’70s glam. Stuff would get smashed, but most of the time he was freakishly good at the job. By the end of it, Bellamy could fluently translate his grandiose, pentatonic misery into four minutes of thrillingly throwaway pop. For that, they were shipped out to studio sets for Live & Kicking and The Pepsi Chart Show, learning to peddle the shamelessly real while embracing the shamelessly fake. But that is not how the British trio got to be stars. At nine, you are witnessing genius.īy this point, Matthew Bellamy’s heavy rock laments had already won Muse a global cult, gripped by his softness and oddness.
Origin symmetry tv#
What are you watching? A satire of an empty TV spectacle, perhaps. You know he is miming, but he also performs the artifice of mime-that is, he is miming miming-and as the credits roll another man bursts in and inexplicably breakdances. He throttles the guitar, hops about the stage, barely pretends to sing and play. The song, introduced as “New Born,” begins to overwhelm him.
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