MUSE

I'm a hard listener to please. I can pick apart most anything I hear, and I seldom like newer music because I prefer the older original music that inspired it. That aside, I've recently found a band that I can finally get excited about other than Radiohead. (I may post some thoughts about their upcoming CD later) As much as I love Radiohead, there new stuff always leaves me wishing they could go back to their OK Computer days. I miss some of their catchier stuff. The new stuff is good in its own way, but OK Computer was a landmark album, and I don't think they've topped "Paranoid Android" since then.

When I was on a Mexico mission trip this summer, a video came on for a band called Muse that I hadn't seen or heard before, and I really loved it. It's a song called Knights of Cydonia. It's kind of like spaghetti western meets kung fu meets space lasers. The video is pretty entertaining, but the song was really well written with lots of dynamics.

So I bought their latest CD on iTunes called Black Holes and Revelations. It is just not often enough that I've bought a CD by a recent artist where I like listening to the whole thing. Sure I love Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin, because every song on their albums is usually worth hearing. But now, too many artists have gotten away with releasing one catchy song with junk for the rest of the CD. That's been the blessing of iTunes with the ability to only get the good ones.

But this time I splurged, and have been happy with it. I've been listening to the CD in the car back and forth from wherever I've been driving, and it continues to be good. They've been accused of being a Radiohead rip off, and the lead singer does have a very Thom Yorke-like voice. But they have some really original sounding songs, and not every song sounds alike by any means. Nearly all of them have lots of variation within the structure of the songs. If you like Radiohead, you might want to try Muse.

The other good thing about them is that they tour around the US some, from what I can tell. I've wanted to see Radiohead for years now, and they almost never come around here.