BLACK HOLES AND REVELATIONS

On their fourth album Muse dial back the bombast a little and go out of their way to offer a more diverse selection than the all-explosions-all-the-time offerings of Origin of Symmetry and Absolution. The band are clearly making an effort to broaden their sound a bit here, which is fair enough, but at the same time this also makes the album one of Muse's more forgettable works - because it seems to be deliberately trying to scale back the drama of the last two albums few of the songs really impress themselves on the listener's consciousness. I liked it for the first few listens, but whilst the earlier Muse albums grew on me over time, this one shrunk on me.