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Rating: Mutuality of Suffering.
Beyond the full house announced by the "sold out" signs at the ticket offices, not many are waiting for the litanies of the three English guys (in the end 4500 in total). They had the path opened by Cave In, but I won't narrate anything about these four poor souls catapulted in front of an audience not suited for them and mortified by a poor and densely incomprehensible sound.
I don't want to be harsh but when they decided to tackle a Led Zeppelin cover, I decided they would have been more pleasant to listen to through the filter offered by the bathroom walls, so I went to the appropriate facilities...
The actual concert begins, and as it often happens, the sound takes on a much more defined, massive, and powerful contour, well mixed between the instruments and Bellamy's immediately warm voice. The Marshall stack vibrates with more decisiveness and liveliness now that it is urged by the three English guys.
The concert starts with Bellamy at the electric piano for "Apocalypse Please" (the track that opens their latest album "Absolution"), with the leader ready to strap on the guitar to intone "Hysteria". Two contrasting tracks with which the Devon guy (about 200-250 miles from London) blatantly declares that he, as an experienced musician, can hold the stage with either instrument.
He does more, because with the third track "New Born," he tackles the piano first and then the guitar in the same song. However, here, inevitably, the troubles begin. The mistake is glaring in the passage from the first part of the song (soft and played with the piano) to the very aggressive stanzas (played with the guitar), a transition well defined yet well mixed on the record but poorly executed live with an unexpected break and the consequent loss of time by the rhythm section. After such a high decibel peak, a rest for the eardrums is urgent: here's the ballad "Sing for Absolution," where the slightly distorted bass amalgamates the overall sound with a decidedly pleasant result.
The concert flows swiftly between hard rock, a delightful piano fantasy by Bellamy, and traditional ballads, a studied play of highs and lows, speed changes, rhythm, and volume that the audience seems to appreciate a lot.
Even though mastering the scene, the dynamic and simultaneously sad melody flowing from Matt's seductive voice cannot continuously cover the structural gaps in some arrangements.
This underlying problem of the British group, evident thanks to the repeated listening in the band's albums (and massively present in their latest "Absolution"), is pleasantly diminished in the live performance, where the audience's excitement and the compelling grit of the guys, along with a powerful and generous sound, will make the irreproducibility of the live artistic performance a moment to be remembered without any fault, almost to be re-interpreted by the fans who would never accept sound gaps or errors from their idols.
The audience wants to see in Muse the heroes who, narrating of the decadent times and the offended love, revealing their word even "in every toilet" (Muscle Museum), will lead the ranks of followers towards the paranoid freedom of contemporary man. And they don't hold back. One cannot blame the three for disengagement, but a bothersome detachment from the audience persists, which "drags itself along" rather than being dragged by the English band.
The band's most poetic part is found when, through the abuse of obstinate and repeated expressions, such as "fall, fall down, falling away," Matt and his associates drag us into a turbulent descent toward oblivion, depression, loss of hope and love, the will to live, only to come out strongly with cries of revenge to rise towards the light. But the hope that rises toward the light is not that of a better world but the desire that decay is collective, the pain is common, that the singer is not the only one suffering, but that like him, everyone else must necessarily undergo ordeals of all kinds.
A sort of cosmic leopardian pessimism dragged into a rock key and reformed into an advanced form of mutuality of suffering.
Surely the guys give their best when tackling the older tracks (like Muscle Museum, which apart from a guitar sound too hidden by the abuse of flanger and delay was truly gripping or in the more recent Plug In Baby which separates the end of the concert from the two encores), where their greater confidence with the song structures is noticeable.
Overall a decent concert, nothing transcendent, but at least the guys have passed almost unscathed through the shock of a poor second album. I would really like to see them produced by a great one, who explains well what composition means and what is, differently, the arrangement and overcomes the despicable opposition easily audible between pre-recorded lines and chords played live.
The three can make it and need just a little help. I pray for them to get the phone number of Brian Eno or Robert Fripp...
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