Review Summary: Muse's first album and still stands up as one of their best
Muse.
A three-piece rock band from the idyllic southwest coast of England (Devon), a region associated with fields, Glastonbury, good cheese and cider, that pirate accent, beautiful cliffs, and now, hard-rocking proto-prog rock bands.
Matthew Bellamy is the main man, singer, guitarist, pianist, songwriter, lyricist, frontman. He does all this with such throwaway ease, and it's difficult to say what he is best at. His guitar abilities improved over the years but were always solid, his vocal range is insanely high and his piano is at times nothing short of virtuosic.
Not to mention the songwriting which is always with Muse of a very high quality. There is no filler with Muse. There are a couple of more forgettable tracks on this album but they aren't bad songs that just meander around aimlessly. Even 'Sober' and 'Escape' have their moments.
Showbiz is not considered Muse's best album by most fans and critics. They all seem to have a consensus that it's the sound of a band finding their feet and that they were always destined for Black Holes and Revelations and further albums with their sold-out-stadium sound.
It's a comment easily made in retrospect. Muse have just always had good songwriting at their heart and I'm glad to see a rock band do so well as they have done. That's the boring explanation but often life is quite boring.
The album opens with Sunburn which is a cool arpeggiated piano part that sinisterly floats around before crashing into this hard rock song. The anguish and punch of gut feeling from this track is irresistible and as with Muscle Museum it uses nice Spanish-sounding chord changes that in the words of Matt Bellamy "sound very heavy, without using a distortion pedal". And then with distortion on top they're even heavier.
This song was used in an iMac advert in 1999 which brought the band some more recognition.
Muscle Museum is the fan favourite from this album. "I dont want you to adore me / dont want you to ignore me / when it pleases you / Yeah / and I'll do it on my own / and I'll do it all by myself." A track that just pounds emotions and grabs you with its Adriatic chord changes, revolving around F # minor, which build into something much heavier and darker. The vocals at the end are also very high and very impressive that he can reach these notes. Still one of Muse's best songs.
The title track 'Showbiz' is arguably the best song on this album. The concept of the track is that nobody is honest and everybody is playing a role all the time in life - like it's a film or a play. Hence, showbiz. These masks everyone hides behind. It's a song that builds up, lots of use of F # minor and gets darker and heavier until this incredible false crescendo and final crescendo that, when turned up full volume, just blow you away. Something of a pattern emerging on this album of dark, brooding rock anthems that build up into something uncontainable, as if they are being unleashed, over heavy chords like F #Â*minor, which on the guitar in standard tuning is one of the most naturally heavy sounding chords.
Other songs worth pointing out here are Uno, a fantastic use of a 3 chord trick, and Cave which floats around several different riffs and parts before fading out with a beautiful piano figure.
Unintended, an acoustic ballad, is as good if not better than Fake Plastic Trees and the remaining tracks, from Sober onwards, are not bad but they never reach the heights of Muscle Museum and the title track again.
I find it cliched to say, "this is the sound of a band finding its feet and they were always destined for bigger and better things".... this album is the sound of their first 5 - 10 years of existence. There was no grand master plan. Their sound proved popular, helped in no small part by Matthew Bellamy's sheer talent. His desire to continually re-invent their sound as well no doubt helped. They also filled a void somewhat, with not too many rock bands in the 2000s and 2010s with their level of songwriting quality.
This is the sound of a band that stood above many others at the time because the songwriting is of a very high quality. It's not much more complicated than that. They went on to bigger things, sure, but what do you expect - them to go backwards? You can see a very intelligent young man wrote these songs, with a perceptiveness that rivals the likes of Damon Albarn and Alex Turner and Morrissey. It's natural that he should pursue other sounds after this.
But this album still stands up. Suburn, Muscle Museum, Showbiz are 3 of Muse's best songs. The sheer power they release and build-up of tension they capture is almost unparalleled in their (impressive) back catalogue.
I give this 4 stars because the songs are all good. I do think that Origin of Symmetry , Absolution, Black Holes are all better albums, but they don't have Muscle Museum on them! Or even Coma ( b-side from around this period) which could easily have replaced Overdue.
Choice Cuts -
Muscle Museum
Sunburn
Showbiz
Unintended
Uno
