Review The telegraph

[mattcita]

Hello, Teignmouth!” yelled Matt Bellamy, geekily smiling as thousands of arms were raised aloft in greeting.

This must be every band’s secret fantasy: taking over their hometown to perform a triumphant open-air concert in front of family, friends, schoolteachers and (one imagines) bullies and detractors.

 


Last seen in the UK playing two nights at Wembley Stadium in 2007, Muse chose to launch their forthcoming fifth album, The Resistance, with two shows in a seafront square in the sleepy Devon tourist town they once called home. Streets were cordoned off, barricades erected and the entire population seemed to have turned out to celebrate the returning heroes. And what a show they were given.

The stage was dressed like a giant Punch and Judy show. A full moon hung over the black sea and seagulls wheeled overhead, while green lasers flashed patterns through dry ice. Muse’s special effects may be as cheesily traditional as ice cream and kiss-me-quick hats, but they are effective nonetheless. Muse are not in the least embarrassed about the virtues of old-fashioned showmanship and musicianship, but their secret is the way they push everything a little bit further than you expect, until it seems not so much familiar as boldly eccentric.

Muse dish out a glam, electro, nu-metal, epic prog-rock stew that marries Queen with Queens of the Stone Age, then overlay it all with a quality of 21st-century, web-geek paranoia.

Their new single, The Uprising, cheekily references the Dr Who theme, but they get away with it because main man Bellamy actually has the wired, bug-eyed weirdness of the Timelord reconstituted as an extravagently talented multi-instrumentalist.

He sings songs of alien invasion with deadpan conviction, his mad musical imagination perfectly supported by the precise playing and gang loyalty of drummer Dom Howard and bassist Chris Wolstanhome. Wherever Bellamy dares to go – soaring melodies, crackpot lyrics, classical interludes and Celtic rock instrumentals – they are there with him.

Their encore of Knights of Cydonia is not so much spaghetti western as spaghetti Martian, so magnificently ridiculous and ridiculously magnificent that resistance is futile.

While the music industry search for heirs to U2, Muse are taking the big rock space by stealth. Today Teignmouth, tomorrow the world!