“Fans come to expect…of us now – everything we release is a shock,” that’s what bassist Christopher Wolstenholme said in an interview with The Guardian on Muse’s fifth album, The Resistance.  The album is said to be the biggest from the band to date and was released on September 13th.

It ends with a 13 minute epic of classical triumph – blasting out three parts of Exogenesis that are instrumentally far too intense to be the work of 3 Teignmouth boys.  But it is the final track of this so typically untypical album from Muse.  And it could be anything from religiously intense to scientifically thrilling – it could appear on the soundtrack to another Matrix or on the 21st century man’s remembrance of the Crusades.  There are the single monotonous plunks of keys that tug at you and the violins that trace passionate images of adventure and romance and drum rolls that alter the sound-scape of your travels from haunting plains to steeply ascending climbs to cloud-parting plummets.

Uprising which is the first release from the album, starts on the same pace as Black Holes and Revelations and seems in synth effects and keyboard melody, a continuation of that self-loathing saga.  But the difference is a clap-clap style beat that underscores the track with more energy and a dangerous-sexy vibe.  Matt Bellamy’s vocals strain lingeringly over the track in clasp-the-chest drama that seems a little pretentious since we’ve already heard the best of it in its original brooding wrist-slitting form in Thom Yorke.  And then just when you think it’s over, it starts again, with a Bond-style guitar scale twang-ing in the background as Bellamy champions ‘fame will not control us, we will be victorious.’ 

Yes a typically Muse song will have to give a shin-kick to major record labels.
The entire combination is too much fun to be taken too seriously but also too Muse-like to not be regarded as seriously rocking! The song rises with electronica sounds that make us remember why sometimes plugged in, computer-generated, spacey sounds can give rock and roll such a high.  That’s the progression.  And yes that’s what Radiohead did with Kid A.

Undisclosed Desires starts like an ordinary pop song with a Britney Spears style sticky beat–seriously, you almost expect Britney or that new chic Sasha Fierce to start on the vocals.  But then (thankfully) we hear Bellamy’s Depeche Mode like vocals make the whole song erupt with a quasi-Japanese electronic grandness and suddenly its raining blossoms on the space-plastic umbrella.  The bass twang combines with the short quips of keyboard to remind us just why this band is so wonderfully and coolly out there!

United States of Eurasia starts as a piano ballad as Bellamy quietly starts on vocals that seem almost Queen-like in the way it is delivered with such restraint over such a simple melody.  But as you listen you are constantly expecting him to let go of that restraint and it does – almost as you expect it – and in the same Freddie Mercury type moment of operatic tenor now famed in football stadium glory in songs like We Are the Champions.  Except here instead of saying Man-United, Bellamy bellows United States!  But then it strangely develops into a quasi-Arabic melody like you were now on a magic carpet ride to Bohemia.  And then he is joined by a choir, chanting Eurasia, in war-like theatrics as if announcing the arrival of the marching troops of the wicked Axis of evil in World War II.  And then as the chaos of music settles, it seems that all that emerges in the shadows is a little girl dancing ballet quietly in a room, glistening with a piano-playing background.  That’s just the image we heard in our heads.  But that’s how absurdly eclectic this track is.  Sometimes pretentious for trying too hard to be too many things and sometimes as wonderfully absurd as Alice would have it.

Unnatural Selection starts with church-like organ accompanying Bellamy’s distorted vocals before whipping out a mean guitar, making this track one of the heaviest on the album.  And when its not thumping out its crunchy progression, it breaks down into a guitar-meets-Bellamy melody, that reaches Serj Tankien style grandioseness.  There’s even collaborative-fist-pumping chants that complement the most dramatic moments of the chorus.  But it’s not the kind of song that gets goosebumps on your back – it’s just the kind of track that makes you crank it up, grin and go ‘woo-hoo’!
There are piano-led ballads, there are 80’s arena-ready musical drama, there are marching arpeggios, there are synth-heavy beats, and there are opera-like vocals.  It’s always eclectic and maybe that’s why it’s no longer really shocking, but it’s still very Muse.

United States of Eurasia
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Exogenesis (Part I)
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The length that stars go to today to make music that appeals.  Is it supposed to please existing fans.  Is it supposed to garner new ones.  To be a popular mainstream artist is to be inspired or plagued by the need to please.  Some artists will venture into the future and extract the most extreme conceptions of technology that they think will define the future.

Others will try to recreate the magic of past musical eras.  But  the need to please as many as is necessary to push the album sales is what makes the beat throb on your radio.  
The Black Eyed Peas epitomize life in the mainstream of music.  They please the beat-lovers of the party, they please the lazy DJ who cant get the crowd on to his sparkly dance floor, they please the tacky humor that thrills car loads of road-trippers.  Bouncing up and down charts with as much intense vigor as their songs bounce off your speakers.   The energy may be too intense with bubble-gum fun to last longer than one pop of radio overplay, but the Peas keep refilling our pints of meaningless merriment.  So in that sense, the energy never really does end.

And that is precisely the concept and title of the zany crew’s fifth album, the first installment of music from the Peas since their superstar whopper in 2005, Monkey Business.  The new album is called The E.N.D. which is the apt acronym for The Energy Never Dies.  The new pop-dance goddess Lady GaGa had to step aside to let the addictive bass line of Boom Boom Pow mastermind the return of Jackson-like robotic dance moves.  The rest of the album is pretty much a card pack of the same poses tossed in the air like child’s play and  yet falling into a fan of tricks that are sometimes as glamorous as royalty, sometimes as goofy as jesters and sometimes glaring with the numbers they will reach in chart success.  The colorful plume on the album include styles that combine electro, dance-punk and house influences with a synth-clad trail.  
From drunken booty-calling over jittery keyboards on Ring-a-Ling to punk rock rants in Imma Be to raggae nation tributes in Electric City, the songs are all fizzing with energy but their lyrical content may sometimes be just another empty can.  In the song One Tribe for example, the Peas lead rapper, Will.i.am suggests that peace may come if the whole world was struck by an epidemic of amnesia.  Such a tacky try at writing a song that cares about the world – which becomes all the more intolerable when the true man in the mirror has died – is thankfully lost in the wonder of beat-mixes from the rhythm-man rapper.

Still smoking hot, Fergie’s singing is the most dynamic in the album, from her disco-diva style wailing balladry in Meet Me Halfway to her comically ferocious rants over power-pop guitar in Now Generation.  Rappers Taboo and Apl.de.ap alternate between each other while Will.i.am is virtually everywhere in every song, like the Mr Magnolia orchestrating this emporium of seemingly simple but still brilliantly entertaining beat-plays.  But in case you missed it, the real quantum physics of the energy in E.N.D. is the standard formula for party-playing.  The Peas maintain their musical commitment to a good party with countless booms and pows in kick-drum and electro-pop festivity on “Party All the Time,”  “Rockin’ to the Beat” and “Rock That Body.”

And the videos are certainly no party-poopers – the Peas don costumes, like Fergie’s comically ill-suited dreadlocks in “Electric City” or leave most of their clothes behind, like Fergie parading a thong and a bra in “I Gotta Feeling.”  Either way, when you’re riding with the Peas, you know you’re in a free-for-all party, that nobody wants to miss.  Who knows you might even join Will.i.am in I Gotta Feeling and shout Mazel Tov!

Track Listing

Song Title	Time
1. Boom Boom Pow	4:12
2. Rock That Body	5:24
3. Meet Me Halfway	7:24
4. Imma Be	6:03
5. I Gotta Feeling	4:14
6. Alive	3:25
7. Missing You	3:49
8. Ring-A-Ling	5:17
9. Party All The Time	4:41
10. Out Of My Head	5:00
11. Electric City	4:13
12. Showdown	4: 27
13. Now Generation	4:06
14. One Tribe	4:40
15. Rockin To The Beat	3:46

Rock That Body
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Meet Me Halfway
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Imma Be
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I Gotta Feeling
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Alive
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Ring-a-Ling
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Electric City
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Showdown
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Now Generation
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One Tribe
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