Muse – Showbiz

In my last post about Muse, it was pointed out that, when I called Origin Of Symmetry the “rockin” album, Absolution the “epic” album and Black Holes And Revelations the “pop” album, I didn’t say anything about Showbiz. So I decided to give Muse’s debut album a spin, not even a week after writing up Origin Of Symmetry. Oh yeah, I’m dangerous like that:

Thing is, when a band comes out with a debut, the only classification that one can really give it is “The best stuff we used to play before we struck oil and got signed”. Bands like Muse who only took 7 years to get a debut album out tend to make for awkward debuts because they had been playing many songs for many years and in many styles, so really Showbiz is a collection of just a bunch of radically different styles thrown together to see what sticks.

Turns out, what sticks are songs like “Sunburn” and “Muscle Museum”, placed conveniently right at the front of the album. Man those songs are hot.

“Sunburn” has an excellent if not simple (for Matthew Bellamy’s considerable piano skill anyway) piano riff that plays throughout, and the beat that comes in is also fantastic. Everything really comes together in the chorus with a nice rolling distorted bassline, and the noisy guitar solo would soon become a staple of the band’s more rockin’ hits. Even after becoming the hugest band in the gol’dern world, Muse still throws this one out at nearly every concert, as I understand.

“Muscle Museum” is just about as impressive, even if the bassline is basically 2 notes. The guitar makes up for it with a super minory riff that makes for a great hook. This is the kind of song that should have been in the soundtrack to a Guy Ritchie film or something, you know, back when he made good films.

“Filip” is a very good example of what doesn’t work with Muse. They can be really awkward with major keys, and aside from that, the entire thing kind of sounds like something hastily thrown together that doesn’t work, like a pancake salad. The bridge is “all right” but not worth wading through the terrible verses to get to. Ok, ok, I’ll stop with this one.

Seriously though, skip often. OK we’re moving on.

“Falling Down” is much more like it. It’s a very slow, bluesy number where Bellamy demonstrates just how much tremolo he can put behind that voice of his. I really like this song, and it’s too bad they never really repeated this style. It doesn’t really suit them nowadays, I guess. I am too lazy to check whether this song is a cover or an original, but the lyrics are unusually good!

We then move on to “Cave“, which is a good song but honestly they have done better songs like this. It’s supposed to be a total rock-out song but is kind of hindered by its plodding beat and repressed instrumentation. I enjoy the song (particularly singing along to the chorus) but I can’t help but feel like they already did way better than this just a few songs earlier.

I feel the opposite about the album’s title track, however, as “Showbiz” is slow but not “plodding”, and there is a lot of creativity in the song’s 5 minutes as it builds up and builds up to the first of many excellent vocal exercises on the part of Matt Bellamy. The final note the song ends on is meant to sound like a real strain (he almost sounds like he passes out at the end), and it possibly is, but he performs this song just as well in concert so who knows.  The bass is another interesting thing about this song, despite the lack of a great variety of notes, it sounds like he’s going from an upright double bass to a distorted electric bass, or possibly both. The tone is interesting, is all I’m saying.

Now that we’ve built the song up to a really rockin’ middle of the album, apparently it’s time to tone it all the way down with something that has become quite a rarity with Muse: the slow love-lorn serenade. Yep, even the rockinest rock trio in the world has one. “Unintended” is a beautiful song, too. I really have no complaints about it, except that they never tried to emulate it after this album. Again, like “Falling Down”, it doesn’t really fit in the grand scheme of their work I guess. Gorgeous melody though! Incidentally, the chords used were cannibalized later to make “New Born”, no lie!

The album, at least for me, makes a serious down-turn at this point. One could even call it a nose-dive. We start with the nearly-painful guitar screeches that open up “Uno” (the band would later use EVEN SCREECHIER guitar for the song “Ashamed” from Hullabaloo Soundtrack, just try and listen to that song on headphones). The bassline comes in to rescue the song and provide us with that ever-necessary hook, but it’s like a more boring ripping-off-Carmen version of the bassline for “Muscle Museum”. Now, I make a point not to criticize Muse based on their lyrics, but I have to say that, since there’s not much else going on in this track, that the lyrics are particularly cheeseball. As the song itself says:

This is nothing to me
And you don’t know what you’ve done, but I’ll give you a clue

Then we move on to a song I swear was recycled for parts of a few songs from Black Holes And Revelations. Really, “Sober” isn’t so bad, it just suffers slightly from too-many-choruses syndrome, and this isn’t the 80’s, so marks off for that.  I’m kidding, I don’t give/take away marks, in fact I’m liking this song slightly more than usual while sitting here listening to it.

“Escape” comes not to take us away from this album, but to keep us here for another ballad-turned-rock song. It starts out as a fairly nice song, not quite gorgeous like “Unintended”, and then the riff comes in and the song prepares you to rock out, but then it just goes into a heavier version of the ballad, while the bassline wanders off the path and out of the song in that kind of way that basses shouldn’t (this move is one of the main reasons I hate most alternative rock actually). The vocals also kind of do the same at points, I don’t know it’s like the album is tired of rocking at this point.

Then “Overdue” comes in and is just… a generic alternative rock song with a bit of a fast-finger bassline. I mean, this song is ok I guess, but it could be on the radio, it’s so dry. Maybe that’s what the band was experimenting with.

The sound of crickets chirping brings us to the close of the album, “Hate This & I’ll Love You“. It’s not so bad, listening to it now though, it almost sounds like Muse’s attempt to do Jeff Buckley. Given that Muse has not failed to end an album on a “Holy man that is awesome” feel on any album after this, I wouldn’t consider this a successful end to the album.

So there you have it. I absolutely adore about half of this album, and the rest is a mess that Muse made no hesitation in cleaning up for every album afterwards. Albums that, in my little heart, are made of solid gold. So perhaps it’s not that I think Showbiz is a bad album, as none of the songs besides “Filip” are particularly terrible, but their sound grew and matured exponentially after this, so it’s kind of overshadowed by what Muse is actually capable of.

(Dedicated to the dude who introduced me to Muse officially, Justin P8)