Muse
Origin of Symmetry
Mushroom Records

Four years ago, Radiohead singer Thom Yorke commented in a Q magazine article just after the release of his band's third album: "Us on hard drugs? That would be horrible. We'd probably end up sounding like Bryan Adams."

Or the group might sound like Muse, a band who sounds like a chemically altered Radiohead — even though the two bands are nothing alike musically. Muse is more punk and much weirder, like Chopin meets Nirvana while in the midst of an orgy with a greasy guy in a mohawk who was deluded into thinking that he fronted the Sex Pistols. Muse rocks much harder than its, ahem, muse ever did (and neither is the group half as depressing), but they can also be pretentious in a way that Radiohead — or Nirvana — never was.

Symmetry's opener, "New Born," begins deceptively with an echoing piano melody that wouldn't sound out of place on a 17th century French ballroom floor or wafting from Wednesday Addams' music box. The listener is then whiplashed into a wall of Nirvana-esque fuzz guitar that begs to be moshed to. Startlingly effective if not absolutely insane. And it works. Except for the vocals.

Singer/songwriter Matt Bellamy's faux-operatic, flesh-grating, nasal wail gives the impression that he's trying too hard to impersonate Thom Yorke. His quaky, affected voice — admittedly the most Radiohead-sounding thing on the album — is so overbearing it strangles otherwise mostly harmless songs and inflates them to the extent of self-parody.

In his attempt to sound emotional, Bellamy only comes across as vain and insincere. A vocal vibrato shouldn't sound forced ... and if it is used at all, it should be used with careful discretion, not reckless abandon. For all the studying the members of Muse have done of The Bends, Bellamy could have taken a lesson from Yorke's amazingly versatile vibrato, which is never overblown or fake.

On "Micro Cuts," a gothic number fraught with pulsing organ, more mosh-rawk guitar and heavy bass, Bellamy somehow gets the idea that his Amazing! Quivering! Falsetto! would work for an entire song. "Hands are red with your blame/ megaphone screaming my name/ someone I should've loved/ souls weeping above," he screeches, sounding for all the world like Jessye Norman or Kathleen Battle being violently tickled to death by Darth Vader's henchmen. Only on "Plug In Baby" and the diet Korn "Citizen Erased" do Bellamy's vocals come closest to sounding unaffected and natural.

Upon first listen, Bellamy's piano skills seem incredible. Across the space of the album, however, it becomes apparent he's mercilessly flaying the same arpeggios to death. They appear in more than half the tracks to sometimes cartoonish effect, most notably on "Bliss;" "Space Dementia," a heavily-distorted-guitar-and-pounded-piano track that shreds nerves after the first couple hundred repetitions of the cascading keyboard line; "Micro Cuts;" and the uncharacteristically hushed, Spanish-guitar-driven closer, "Megalomania." The quiet ballroom-waltzish-piano- smashes-into-a- wall-of-noise intro, a nice piece of novelty at the start of the record, turns up on too many other songs. But Bellamy's piano work, Chris Wolstenholme's muscular bass, and an almost soulful vocal that sounds eerily like Yorke in his pre-Pablo Honey years mesh together quite well on the mostly jazzy "Feeling Good." Too bad it's a cover.

Overshadowed by Bellamy's blown-up, melodramatic vocals and wank-happy guitar, Dominic Howard (drums) and Wolstenholme (bass, backing vocals, keyboards), who comprise the other two-thirds of Muse, lend some particularly inventive effects to Symmetry: the weird, shuffling coconutty percussion on the quiet, Spanish-guitar-tinged "Screenager," the sepulchral bass on "Dark Shines" and "Plug In Baby," the sound that could only be described as a crazed cellist frantically bowing chicken wire at the beginning of the bass-heavy "Hypermusic" (or is that Bellamy himself?).

By the end of the album, the combination of Bellamy's preposterous howl, the manic chamber-music organs and the overuse of loud mosh guitar is draining. And not in a good way, either. Symmetry succeeds as a good send-up of punk in all its undisciplined energy, but little else.

— Ana Davis (addavis at ucsd dot edu)