Welcome to M20, a personal recollection of the most important albums of my life, starting in 1999. I will choose an album released that year that had the most impact on me. This is not necessarily the best of the year, and they may not necessarily continue to hold up. This is about the journey.
Of all the bands I was once crazy about, Muse seems to be the one that has aged the worst. More on that later. I discovered them early, on their third single all the way back in 1999, after which they completely disappeared until Kyle started raving about their second album. It would be 2003 before they’d really take hold of me with their third album, Absolution.
Up until then, the most common comparison you would see with regards to Muse was Radiohead. I continue to not fully understand that analogy, and Absolution would make it clear who they were the real modern take on: Queen. This was rock on a grand scale. The guitar solos were loud, the bass riffs were insane, and the drumming was rolling thunder. As a snarky Somethingawful article claimed, “Muse is too pussy to be metal, and too metal to be cool.” But that’s exactly what made them cool to me. Matthew Bellamy was the shining example of a rock frontman, going back and forth between Guitar Hero and classically trained pianist, able to scream in falsetto. Hearing a symphonic rock track broken up by an excerpt of Rachmaninoff made me feel like my childhood training on piano wasn’t lame anymore. It was fucking awesome, and maybe I could be fucking awesome too.
2003 proved to be the hardest year of my academic career. I was taking too many requisites at once. In addition to organic chemistry and genetics, I took a course called Biochemistry II, and found myself in a class of five students. I was the only one who had not taken the previous course, and the teacher, who had never liked me, just kept going as if uninterrupted by the winter break. On my first exam, I got a 15. That was the closest I’ve ever been to crying in class, including as a child. That semester, my closest grandparent, my mom’s mother would pass away. I remember my girlfriend seeing me after class, absolutely crushed, and rushing to give me a hug. Unsurprisingly, this loss did not make the school year any easier, and I just barely passed the class, managing to hang onto my scholarship for the last year.
During my senior year, after the album’s release, I borrowed a bass from Kyle and spent the school year teaching myself guitar. I’d buy my own acoustic once I got out on my own, and I still have it to this day. I really don’t play it enough.
At this point, Muse was still a British import. Their previous album wouldn’t come out in 
the United States until 2005. Once Absolution got its US release in 2004, it would be the first of their albums to crack the US charts. So in addition to my love of the huge sound, it also felt like I was clued into a music scene that most Americans didn’t know about. It’s why I would spend the next year of my life obsessed with British music mags like Q, and trying to understand why they were so obsessed with Kasabian (they still are).
Sometimes I preferred the more melodic songs like “Time is Running Out”. The video is pretty cringe-y now, but at the time, it felt like they were really going for a basic political statement, one year before Green Day released American Idiot.
Sometimes I was just there for the instrumental talents, like “Hysteria”’s absurd bassline.
But for me the best of the tracks was the last one: “Ruled by Secrecy”. A much slower song, which could be hit or miss with Muse, but interrupted by a phenomenal piano solo.
I would go on to see them perform at Georgia Tech in 2005 with my girlfriend and a friend attending the university. Unfortunately, Absolution would prove to be the band’s high point. Their next album had some very high points, but the lower points were lower and more numerous. From here on, the music would go in a different direction, and Muse’s already mediocre lyrics would take on the conspiratorial cliches one would expect from 9/11 truther Bellamy (“fat cat’s had a heart attack”). Their 2009 album has track titles like “MK Ultra”, “United States of Eurasia (+ Collateral Damage)”, and “Exogenesis: Symphony Part 3 (Redemption”). Ugh.
Honorable Mention: Originally, I was going to give this spot to the White Stripes’ fourth album Elephant. But aside from a few fantastic tracks (“Seven Nation Army”, “Bell & Buscuit”), there’s a lot of filler. So once again, and not for the last, I’m going back to Radiohead.
I earlier made mention of the fact that I was really getting into politics at this time, and at the moment, no album title could have been more on the nose than Hail to the Thief. It’s not a concept album or anything, but it does feature lines like “Don’t question my authority or put me in a box” and “Maybe you’ll be President/But know right from wrong”. It’s inconsistent tone might be why it gets praised, but almost always gets listed behind OK Computer, Kid A, and In Rainbows (we’ll get to that, for sure).
Pandemonium of Absence 