Muse

The 2nd Law Warners ***

Trust Muse to name their new album after the Second Law of Thermodynamics; now we have to go visit Wikipedia and try to work out what the hell that is. (Something about energy and the entropy of the universe. Rock my brainy head!) The Devon trio continue to break every law of physics – they should have disappeared down the black hole of prog by now, but they’ve instead they’ve become the black hole, sucking in influences from all around and churning them up into spaced-out operettas.

When the band released a teaser for The 2nd Law, the twitterverse went supernova, with rumours that the Teignmouth troubadours had gone “dubstep”. This was based on a section in the title track that sounds like The Beastie Boys’ Intergalactic.

Reassuringly, The 2nd Law is as OTT as you would expect from the indie ELP, with plenty of operatic flourishes, Wagnerian passages, electro-metal riffs, and the odd detour down an unexpected musical wormhole. So fears that they’ve turned into Digital Mystikz are unfounded. I mean, that would be just too cred.

But does The 2nd Law see Muse notching things up another few Kelvins, or are they just blinding us with science? Certainly it starts off with a big bang. Supremacy has all the Muse tropes in spades: spaghetti- space-epic intro, crunchy Zep riffs, trouser-twisting falsetto, and Bellamy’s usual lyrical obsession with oppression and dystopia.

Some of the tracks fall short of being the supermassive Muse classics they so desperately want to be. Current single Madness sees Bellamy co grind Prince’s Kiss and George Michael’s Faith through a satanic mill. What comes out sounds a bit like a second-rate Queen. Follow Me, Bellamy’s electro-ode to his new son, veers dangerously close to Disneyland.

But other experiments throw up some interesting results. Panic Station takes Bowie’s Fame and Fashion and cuts them into Scissor Sisters shapes, and Animals is a jazz odyssey into the black hole caused by the evil stockbrokers of the world. Big Freeze starts off rather uncomfortably U2-ish, but soon establishes its own identity.

Survival, the official theme for the London 2012 Olympics, may not win gold, but it still gives it welly. And if environmental awareness tune Explorers was a car, it would be a high-emission, gas-guzzling SUV driving recklessly across the tundra with no regard for baby seals in its path. Save Me, one of two songs written and sung by bassist Chris Wolstenholme, offers a welcome respite from Bellamy’s falsetto.

Sadly, no epic sci-fi epics in the vein of Knights of Cydonia or Exogenesis: Symphony, but you could count the final brace of tracks (The 2nd Law: Unsustainable and The 2nd Law: Isolated System) as two halves of one sci-finale.

Overall, The 2nd Law feels like an incoherent vortex of ideas, but at least they have the spaceballs to be totally ridiculous on a grand scale.

Download tracks:Supremacy, Survival, Big Freeze, The 2nd Law