BLACK HOLES AND REVELATIONS

With Black Holes and Revelations, Muse changed a bit their direction, after the acclaimed Absolution. The album is far more cohesive, functioning as a concept album, with a start, a development and one end. Muse are capable of transforming a bunch of good songs into a glorious trip, an energetic and glorious epic feeling, with traces of space-rock and sophisticated electronic, one of the kind almost majestically and compelling enough to grab us from our comfortable, quiet seat to start a new era, a new Humankind. They achieved to make a intelligently quite unique sonority, though owing some of their aesthetics to the masters of sonic rock energy, Queen.

The band was clever to know the way to progress in their sound, incorporating more electronics. The album opens with the glorious "Take a Bow", reminiscent of post-rock and certainly an excellent way to open an album. The song progresses, in a haunting crescendo way, from a quiet whisper and their characteristic psychic arpeggios, to a hypnotic space chaos ending, as Bellamy takes it into political direction. The album gets further with a more simple approach, with the incisive ballad "Starlight" and the space-robot-like "Supermassive Black Hole". Space-dance-driven music gets its peak with "Map of problematique", the most electronic of the badge, while "Assassin" is the rockiest, as the band answers to Dream Theater's plagiarism in their latest album. "Invencible" shows the band's sensibility, evoked on the felt guitar introduction and the great epic solo. The album ends epically with the inspired "Knights of Cydonia", perhaps the best of the album, an energetic song decomposed in three structures whilst Bellamy gives the final effort to change a resigned society "No one's gonna take me alive, Time has come to make things right, You and I must fight for our rights... You and I must fight to survive!".

There is no band who gives so much power and passion, in the meddles of a space-epic way. They had the cleverness of making, in a way which could please the mainstream masses, a completely different album. A 45 minutes epic.