hrotha said:
Disagreed. What makes Muse great is that pointless bombastic grandiloquence. Sometimes less is more, hell, I should know, as most of my favourite bands are punk one way or another, but that's simply not their steez. It's like asking Arcade Fire to not be epic (although in their latest album they definitely turn down the epicness and it works very well).
If I want pointless bombastic grandiloquence I'll listen to Emerson Lake & Palmer, since they were more grandiloquent, more bombastic, and more pointless.
Back in my teenage days I had that whole prog thing going on, the belief that the reason some bands didn't play 7 minute songs with multiple time signature changes and huge solos was because they were incapable. After a while I realised that, actually, it's because they didn't need to. Johnny Marr of the Smiths played guitar lines as difficult as anything any of the big metal or prog acts put out - but for him they were the basis of a 3-minute pop song. Just adding more only works up to a point; once you reach that you're just saturating things, and everything just melts into one. Muse used to be a thoroughly decent band, but they just disappeared up their own asses. A bit like Smashing Pumpkins or Nine Inch Nails before them.
Once I felt like the bombast was something that added to the songs. As they've gone on, it's feeling more and more like the bombast is something designed to mask the songs' inadequacies. A bit like how the comedy videos were designed to draw attention away from the realisation that the Foo Fighters never made a good record apart from their first album.