Just discovered Muse. I really really love them.

Time is Running Out freakin rocks? What about PLUG IN BABY?

Great band.

Fantastic band, and absolutely amazing live. I'm always excited when someone gets turned onto them.

Black Holes & Revelations is their best album, to me. Though I like Absolution and Origin of Symmetry as well.

I can seriously do without Showbiz.

There's another thread below discussing Muse.

http://chud.com/forums/showthread.php?t=92008

Ditto the praise. Fantastic band (and well worth the money I spent to see them open for MCR).

first time i heard these guys, i thought, "man, they sound like Radiohead. But with fucking bawls."

Easily one of the ten rockingest bands in the world... I've been wracking my brain thinking of the others... maybe Radiohead, TV on the Radio, Tool, the Roots, Nine Inch Nails, Sigur Ros... need some help here.

Also, "Knights of Cydonia" needs its own religion.

The video is every bit as insane as the song too.

Even leaving aside the obvious parallels between KoC and the Flash Gordon soundtrack, am I the only one who gets less of a Radiohead and more of a kind of Queen vibe off these guys?

Absolution is better than Black Holes... IMO but I just want to dance when I listen to Supermassive Black Hole, so that alone makes me love the album.

I love the band. And whenever I find a band that I do love, I start digging around for bands that sound the same. I'm sure DaveB is going to come here at any time and show me for the tin-eared music neo-phyte that I am, but I couldn't find anything that really sounded much like them. They make some truly inventive music.

The closest I came was the Manic Street Preachers and the Brianstown Massacre. Which are both okay. You might even stretch and compare Muse to the Dandy Warhols, which I also love. And maybe even The Music, though they sound a lot different, but both share a kind of epic sound. And I didn't choose them because they have almost identical name. Well, mostly.

I only know them from what's on the radio but they sound like early Radiohead. A lot.

Check out Jim Thirlwell either on youtube or at www.foetus.org. He's recorded / appeared under a number of different names so it can be a bit confusing, but he's been dishing up massive, intricate, wrenching and rocking sound since the early 80s.

I was so thrilled to see 28 Weeks Later because of Muse - I really really love them too. I don't think i'd have liked the movie half as much without them. I haven't given the new [to me] album a thorough listen yet but I never tire of the earlier stuff. Feeling Good is my favorite, I think, slightly ahead of Plug In Baby.

Another comparable band might be Spiritualized. Some of "Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space" but more so "Let It Come Down" remind me of Muse (+ vice versa).

Jim Thirlwell he does the music for The Venture Bros. good shit.

An even more brilliant live band, so much so that I hardly listen to the records anymore, as they don't reach the scope of their concert performances.

Another band that will be present at ACL Festival...ooooh yeah.

I liked them ever since High Tension. Muhahaha.

I'm partial to Super massive Black Hole.

Not at all. Definitely more Queen than Radiohead.

My problem with Showbiz is that it's decidedly more "poppy" than their later albums, and I'm not drawn to that sort of thing. For instance, I always skip over Supermassive Black Hole on the "Black Holes" album. But that's me.

If you think Black Holes & Revelations is good, wait until you really listen to their first three albums. Some of those songs in those albums are absolutely mind-boggling in how carefully constructed and how beautiful as a result they are.

As others have mentioned, Plug In Baby and Feeling Good (a cover from a 1965 musical!) from OoS are top notch, Butterflies & Hurricanes and Sing For Absolution from Absolution are also very good, and my current favourite (it alternates really week to week) is Falling Down from Showbiz. I lean towards their melancholy side, though I also love their harder stuff. You should also check out their B-sides which are strong as well, Piano Thing will be right up your alley if you've enjoyed their Rachmaninov stirrings (and it's improvised! And done on one take!).

If you haven't yet, you should also check out their performance of Time Is Running Out from 2004's Glastonbury, shit son, THAT is a rocking performance. Anyways, enjoy.

Don't make that mistake. Absolution threw me on this path, but discovering Origin of symmetry and the new album convinced me they're not a Radiohead cover band stuck in the The Bends days. Pick up Black Holes and Revelations. It's still cheap and you'll get the Queen vibe way more than Radiohead. And it's true that they're impressive live.

That's exactly what I thought the first time I heard them.

I have to say I love the intro to Hysteria. A lot. The rest of the song is good but I can play the intro over and over again and get a kick out of it every time. Great band.

No love for Stockholm Syndrome?

Hullabaloo Soundtrack has got the B-Sides.

Another thing that's worth a listen is there cover of "House of the Rising Sun", which I like quite a bit.

I really like Muse a lot but if I can throw a knock against them, its that their songs are predictably written, as in you kinda know where the song is gonna go even though its the first time you've heard it.

I think Muse went from being a Radiohead redux to Eddie Mercury's wet dream about two songs into Absolution . Also, Stockholm Syndrome, Butterflies and Hurricanes and Knights of Cydonia are three of the best songs I've ever experienced live.

Saw Muse this past Monday at the Garden and got a kick out of the fact that Matthew Bellamy, messing around on the piano in between songs, played a short bit from John William's Temple of Doom score. Looking around I imagined that it must have been completely lost on the predominantly young crowd and was then painfully reminded of just how fucking old of a nerd I am. Fantastic show, by the way.

Count me in on the love. Absolution is my personal favorite, but Showbiz is the only album of theirs that I just can't seem to get into. That album just sounds like a band trying to find their style, which they totally did on Origin of Symmetry. The Radiohead comparisons, in my opinion, are purely a result of the vocal style. I really don't hear a musical connection between the two bands at all (ditto the Queen influence thrown around earlier in the thread. Knights of Cydonia is a prime example).

Favorite tracks are Blackout, Space Dementia, Map of the Problematique, and The Small Print, to name a few. Oh yeah, and then there's Dead Star...

http://youtube.com/watch?v=BkO5GQnKZ5c (This video will rock your face off)



Amen.

I can't edit my post for some reason, but I just wanted to clarify that I was ditto-ing in agreement with the Queen influence thing, not comparing it to my feelings on the Radiohead connection.

I've yet to see these guys live, but I have enjoyed most of their stuff. I'm not going to try and argue that it isn't a pale imitation of Radiohead, Queen or any number of prog-rock bands, and there is something really silly about the overblown, epic quality to most of their songs. Still, for me, it's all in good fun. I sort of look at them as the musical equivalent of a summer blockbuster, an entertaining, low-nutrition diversion to be enjoyed with friends.

I'm also new to the Muse love, but man do they rock. It's amazing how their huge sound only comes from three people.

I've heard such great things about their shows, but I'm fearful of what Muse's abbreviated set will be like at Austin City Limits next month. Can not wait to see these guys, regardless of a paired down spectacle.

It's amazing what the simple addition of Apocalypse Please can do to a trailer.

30 Days of Night
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mX_fAj_wWSk

They were great at Lollapalooza. I know DeRo and Kot were hating on them in their write-up, but they made a lot of fans Sat night.

I think their lead singer might be Rufus Wainwright's alter ago. On Soldier's Poem they sound exactly alike.

A few of my opinions:

1. Comparing a band like this to Radiohead is so very naive. There are about 1800 bands in this style.

2. I think Black Holes is a much better album than Absolution. The songwriting is superior and there are no spots that drag. Who cares if it's overproduced, it sounds better.

3. The singer has an interesting nose.

I like to assume the best of people and think when they make that comparison, they're referring to pre-OK Computer Radiohead.

Agreed. One can never completely write off an album that has Citizen Erased and Plug In Baby on it, though

Overall, I'd say the Bends is the only reasonable comparison point, and even that's not quite right. But Bellamy's vocal melodies and delivery are so Thom Yorke-inspired that a bunch of their songs sound like they took a Radiohead song, junked everything but the vocal track, and wrote less subtle, more show-off-y music around it. Where a standard Yorke vocal line* would go up or down to a certain note, Bellamy does the exact same thing. I find it uncomfortably predictable.

Despite the technical ability on display, I can't get into these guys at all, and I've really tried, since a number of people with taste I respect loudly sing the praises of their live performances.

* This is not to say Yorke doesn't have the increasingly frequent ability to surprise, vocally. In fact, I think much of Radiohead's post-OK Computer work is about Yorke and the others deliberately trying to not do what comes naturally, thus you get songs like "We Suck Young Blood," where his voice sounds exhausted and thin. From what I've heard of Muse, Bellamy likes his voice too much to let it sound anything less than pretty, a tendency that Yorke seems to want to overcome.

You're right about the 1800 similar bands, but I think it's fair to compare Muse and Radiohead since both are better than the other 1798.

True.

Like Justin and Dave said, Absolution is the one album that does however deserves to be compared to Radiohead's The Bends. People around me were making this comparison , and I couldn't really say anything. The same people did shut up after Black Holes.

Unfortunately the "slower" songs on The Bends (Fake Plastic Trees, Street Spirit, High and Dry (NOT Bullet Proof)) are much better than anything Muse has come up with on the slower side.

Also - anyone listening to Muse's earlier records (don't make me re-read this thread)? Showbiz has a few really great songs on it, and I almost think that album is worth comparing to The Bends.


Either way, The Swedish band KENT is better than Muse so this conversation is pointless for myneself.

Origin of Simmetry was the first album I got. I love the first three albums to death, and still kicking myself for not seeing them when they played here.

I never got into Black Holes (funny!), listened to it 2 or 3 times but it somehow never caught me the same way the first three did. Although, seeing all the love, I'm gonna go at it again.

And NO ONE fucking says anything about Uno??? This might sound lame, but that song is just THE song to listen to after a breakup. Crying and cutting up pictures, gently rubbing the gasoline into her hair... Shhh honey... Shhh

I've basically been listen to Black Holes on repeat for the last week. Take A Bow, Starlight, Map of the Problematique, Invincible, Assassin, Exo-Politics, and Knights of Cydonia are all masterpieces. This was the album of the year, and I didn't even hear it until 2007. I NEED to see Muse live, Problematique will probably cause spontaneous childbirth in the audience.