That Underdog Band Who is Low-Key Really Fantastic

Muse is that.

So before this week, I'd heard like maybe four songs by Muse through the span of my life. Uprising was on the radio quite a bit (and my dad really liked it), Starlight was also on the radio a bit (one of my ultimate favourites - it has a cool piano part and the lyrics are poetry), Madness (took me a bit to like it, but the climax is pretty good) and recently, Dead Inside (which is really awesome and dark and creepy and the climax of this song is honestly spine-tingling).

So I'd heard a very small portion of Muse's music. I'd liked all that I'd heard, but I hadn't really sought out anything more.

Then, as I was on one of my Internet strolls, I started, out of curiosity, to look up Project MK Ultra. This is related to the topic, I promise.

So Project MKUltra is a typically messed-up piece of history related to the Cold War, in which throughout the sixties and seventies, the CIA did a lot of top-secret experiments on unwitting participants to see if they could actually control people's minds. This is one of the creepiest things ever, and if you're not getting that yet, allow me to make this clear to you: THIS IS ONE OF THE CREEPIEST THINGS EVER. One infamous experiment involved the death of a bright scientist (they drugged him without his knowledge, and he jumped or possibly fell out a window. This is historical fact). There were a lot of other experiments like that, and they often ended similarly, which didn't stop the CIA from carrying on the Project for a pretty long time. Which is pretty messed up.

Anyways, as I was taking in all this strange-and-creepy-yet-true stuff, I stumbled across a comment that said, more or less, "Well, at least Muse made a cool song out of it."

Excuse me? Someone made a song out of this?

So, because I generally like Muse, and because I desperately needed to hear what kind of song could come out of something that's so wrong on a fundamental level that it would be hard to discuss normally, I looked up the song.

The song is freaking AWESOME.

The guitar part is addictive to listen to, and the lyrics are oddly poetic ("A universe is trapped inside a tear" always gets me. Always), and it has these violins playing for suspense as "They are breaking through...... now we're falling/we are losing control" happens and it's just such a cool song.

So later this week, I was having a problem. The problem was that I was sick and tired of all my playlists, didn't feel like making a new one, and needed something to play while I was doing my homework without me having to choose a song every three minutes, but also wasn't the same thing on repeat. My solution was to try something different and find an album on YouTube by a band I maybe liked (but not an album I knew by heart, like Bastille. I was looking for something different).

So I looked up a Muse album on Youtube, since I now liked five of their songs, and hey, that's pretty serious stuff. The first album that came up was an album of theirs called Resistance, which I clicked on and began to do my homework.

First of all: every song on that album is profoundly different in sound. This is a wonderful thing. It makes it very exciting to listen to.

Second of all: every song on that album is extremely similar in theme. This album had songs with titles such as Uprising, Resistance, Unnatural Selection (not to mention MK Ultra), and it became increasingly clear that most (if not all) of the songs had something to do with fighting against an oppressive society. Which is cool.

Thirdly: as I listened to the lyrics, I heard the words "You'll wake the Thought Police" in the song Resistance. Then as I listened to a song called "The United States of Eurasia", it suddenly became glaringly obvious that the whole album, in fact, was based on the novel 1984 by George Orwell.

And that's freaking awesome.

As you may know, I have a bit of weakness for artists who write songs about, well, anything besides romance. Romance, while probably meaningful to those who write about it, is horridly overdone for someone like me, who has no romantic life whatsoever and isn't particularly interested in seeking one out. I was happy enough to hear Muse writing about things non-romantic, like fighting an oppressive regime. I was both overjoyed and intrigued when I finally (and it took me way too long) understood that the oppressive regime they were talking about was, in fact, Big Brother and the Party. As you may have realized, I have an even bigger weakness for artists who write songs that are stimulating not only musically, but intellectually as well (remember when I realized that Bastille wrote songs about Icarus? And Pompeii? And Laura Palmer? And WRITING?).

And it's not only that they write songs about cool things; the songs are actually good. United States of Eurasia has a really cool interlude that sounds almost oriental before it returns back to the rest of the song, which sounds more than a little like Queen. So that's an odd mixture, and odder still, it works.

Unnatural Selection has an awesome, intense guitar part, as well as some of my favourite lyrics ever, including, "I'm hungry for some unrest/I wanna push it beyond a peaceful protest/I wanna speak in a language they will understand" and, "Counterbalance this commotion/We're not droplets in the ocean". God, it's so awesome.

Resistance has one of the most powerful choruses, and it's cool because the singer actually interrupts the background singers to go into the chorus, like he really is resisting something, and he goes into the chorus with so much more power than in any other part of the song - you just imagine him, like, breaking down a door at that part, and it's with such powerful lyrics as well: "Love is our resistance!"

And of course Uprising is just really good, but I'm not mentioning that as much because I've known that song by heart for a solid three years if not longer.

I love discovering awesome new music. It's like finding a bunch of diamonds in a pile full of worthless rocks.

All in all it's super cool and I'm so happy to uncover a band that's actually worth buying the whole album.

Also they've inspired me to actually read 1984. Yes, listening to a rock band made me want to read. And a rather intellectual novel, at that.

Take that, rock-music-is-for-mindless-punks people.