Muse - The Resistance (2009) Vinyl

As with so many 21st-century mainstream (or quasi-mainstream) rock albums unafraid to stuff 10 tons of quasi-operatic melodrama into 60 or so minutes, The Resistance will be easily dismissed by those into the Grizzly Bear/Dirty Projectors brand of orchestrated art-rock. You know, where the album has a pleasing ramshackle feel under the surface-level skillfulness, the sense that the vocal acrobatics or tricky instrumental interplay could suddenly veer into uncomfortable, mock amateurish expressionism.

By contrast, you never get the sense that Muse are anything less than in total control of their "difficult" music at all times. Throughout The Resistance, frontman Matt Bellamy is ready and willing to foreground his chops, be it tickling the ivories, hopping octaves, or tossing out increasingly tasteful solos. If the The Resistance is "about" anything, aside from the conceptual malarkey encoded in the lyrics, it's about mastery, ego-security, etc. It's the kind of all-caps, no half-stepping ART-ROCK that closes with a three-part mini-epic so shameless about its own classic rock bigness that it's billed as a "Symphony", complete with "Overture". Jumped ship yet?

For the wary or outright dismissive, however, The Resistance is also a very smartly sequenced album. it opens with the most "pop" sequence of the band's career, a three-song sequence aping the stadium-grade synth-rock of Depeche Mode at their crossover height. It then segues into a middle section of hard (but not too hard) rock, nodding in the direction of grottier bands like Queens of the Stone Age or System of a Down without stripping away the sparkle. Only then does The Resistance shift into the sort of fist-pumping, kitchen-sink prog you were probably expecting. It's canny: Leading the uncommitted down a drum machine paved path of catchy 1980s revivalism and straight into the path of an army of kids straddling the gap between entry-level classical and "Headbanger's Ball".