Title: Drones
Artiste: Muse
Genre: Alt-Rock/Progressive Rock
Familiarity: Heard
Black Holes and Revelations; loved it
Track 1(Love) Bit more dancy than I expected; buzzy synth, voice is a little croony but this is not bad.
Track 2 Just a few seconds of a sergeant major shouting at recruits. Meh. I see how it fits in to the story, but as a track I can't give it any rating.
Track 3(Love) Great boogie swing to this; like this a lot.
Track 4(Love) Love the piano here; sort of a cross between U2 and Coldplay. Shut up everyone: I happen to like them. Great hook in the chorus. Powerful guitar too.
Track 5(Love) Superb neoclassical opening then it takes off. Very proggy.
Track 6(Love) Yeah, really like this one too. Some great proggy keyboard
Track 7 Clever yeah, but again I can't really rate a spoken passage that doesn't do anything for me.
Track 8(Love) Very Queen! Which is not a bad thing, though others would have you think otherwise. Not quite as good as the previous tracks but still pretty darn good.
Track 9(Love) Again, a great hook and a wonderful melody.
Track 10(Love) This is a lovely ballad
Track 11(Love) Longest track at ten minutes; lovely acoustic and orchestral opening with whistling, reminds me of the Alan Parsons Project, beginning of
The Turn of a Friendly Card. Some unbelievably emotional slide guitar, getting quite Floydy now. Surprisingly, this appears to be a second ballad --- until it kicks up in the fifth minute and changes totally. Excellent song. And now it's back into ballad territory, pulling in of all things Elgar's “Nimrod” from “The Enigma Variations”. Superb.
Track 12(Love) Really nice closer;
acapella chorus chant thing. Wraps everything up nicely, referencing the opener and asking the question “Are you dead inside?” After this, no way!
End result: Look, you haters can hate all you want, and I may not be sophisticated enough to appreciate two guys yelling at each other from the roofs of opposite buildings while a third tries to unjam a photocopier while cursing in Yiddish, or the sound of a garden gate creaking in a soft rainstorm while someone bashes a kipper against a lamp-post and sings “The Star Spangled Banner”, but I know what I like, and I like this. A lot. A real lot.
So, Love or Hate? If it was all like the penultimate track, this would be a shoe-in for True Love. As it is, the rest is very, very good, just not that good. So it's instead pure
Love here. Haters gonna hate. Don't care.
Chances of a full review:9/10