EPISODE #1; MUSE, ABSOLUTION
If you know me personally, then I classify it statistically
impossible for me to have not mentioned my undying love for Muse around you at
some point. Maybe not directly to you, maybe you heard a conversation I was
having and I mentioned it. But I love Muse. People who know me well/those who
have seen parts of me naked on the internet will know that Absolution in
particular is a special album to me.
Yep. I took this photo right after it was done, hence why it's a bit manky round the edges, but there will always be a reminder of how much Muse changed my life, and how Absolution turned me towards a different style of music altogether, inked on my right shoulder. So this importance this album has in my life made it a good place to start.
Let’s rewind a few years. Around the late spring/early
summer of maybe 2005/6, I bought Absolution on eBay for about a fiver. For the
last few years up to this point, I had been very much in a musical purgatory,
if you will. This was back in the day when social constructs such as ‘greebo’
were rife in high school life (do they still exist?), and instead of declaring
myself part of one tribe or another, I tried to fit in to all the social groups
around me. I convinced myself that I liked both rap and rock, although metal
was a no-no. Hell, I didn’t want people to think I was a goth or an emo. “I
will NEVER like Slipknot” I said once. How times change.
But really, I had never had a music taste – I just liked some stuff, mostly chart stuff. And now,
internet, I would like to share with you my eternal shame. Some people have
really awesome albums as their first records. One of my favourite musicians,
Brann Dailor (drummer of Mastodon), counts really cool shit like Iron Maiden and AC/DC among his
first albums. Me? Vapid pop pretty-boys A1. Oh yeah. Bless you the 90s.
Those guys. Remember them? Technically speaking, they
weren’t even my first album. My first was Now (That’s What I Call Music) 48,
but as a compilation I don’t count it. To this day I could not tell you another
A1 song without Wikipedia. But really, I did not have a cool musical start. The
Black Eyed Peas’ Elephunk album was
next (actually not a bad album, before they went shit, but still not great),
then others I forget/am ashamed to admit. Among those was a fucking Tim
Westwood compilation. I thought I was cool. HAH.
So this time went by with me having no strong musical taste,
trying to convince myself that I liked lots of different styles I’d barely even
heard of – case and point, I heard Slam by
Pendulum on Zane Lowe’s Radio 1 show as ‘Hottest Record In The World Today’ and
suddenly I loved drum ‘n’ bass. Ahem. But among the band names I’d heard on
that show, before I realised I didn’t like Zane, was Muse. Or Mews, as I
thought it was spelt. I know, I’m a tool. And I remembered they had a recent
album, called…um…Absolution? A quick
Google search confirmed, then a quick trip to eBay and a fiver bagged me a
copy. And largely, from the point it arrived onward, my life changed. Sounds
overdramatic, and it wasn’t instantaneous by any means, but it was a milestone.
Obviously I knew what the word absolution meant, with the connotations of the absolving of sins at the end of the world, so I was
thinking “shiiiiit, this is gonna be so dark and heavy and cool”, and so imagine my
surprise when I was right. A summary of my first listen goes something like
this, as I remember it;
Intro/Apocalypse Please: Is this playing? Oh wait, I hear
something. Thump, Thump, Thump Thump Thump.
Ooh, intriguing AAAAAHHHHH JEEEESUS that’s loud piano. What IS this?
Time Is Running Out: Cool bass.
Sing For Absolution: This is nice. In a sad way.
Stockholm Syndrome: *headbangs*
Falling Away With You: *gets goosebumps on arms*
Interlude/Hysteria: OH SHIT this is building to something
epic. *bass comes in* :O
Rest of the album: :O with varying degrees of spinal chills,
particularly during Blackout/Butterlies & Hurricanes/Ruled By Secrecy
Basically, from the first time I heard Interlude/Hysteria, I
was hooked. There is so much I love about the album. The heaviness of some
songs, the tender, epic beauty of others, and the way they transition perfectly
into one another. My favourite example of a transition in the album is between Falling Away With You into Interlude, because the underlying sound
of Interlude is there from the second
verse. It just runs perfectly underneath the song, providing this dark spine to
the song, so that when the rest of the song fades away at the end we’re just
left with the fuzzy tremolo before the bassline that everybody knows them by
kicks in. It’s perfect.
And so that was the point at which my life began to change
really, between Interlude and the
ending track Ruled By Secrecy. Whereas
before I’d been in the no-mans-land I talked about earlier, I started to
develop the taste in music I have now which has had such a huge impact on my
life. I fell in love with Absolution, so I immediately set about obtaining
their back catalogue, so very soon I had it – at this point, Absolution was the
most recent album, so just Showbiz,
Origin of Summetry and Hullabaloo
– and I was hooked. It was the start of a beautiful relationship.
Absolution is an
incredible album; the depth of the apocalyptic concept, the mastery with which
every song is constructed, from the soaring classical elements to the straight
up rock; it is Muse’s best album, and my joint favourite of all time with Origin of Symmetry (yes, my 2 favourite
albums are both Muse). So it is the first album that really began to make me
into what I am now. I could not recommend it more.
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