Observer - Muse, London Astoria (June 2000)

Kids wanna rock! - Muse are in search of teen spirit It's not easy being the best new rock band in Britain these days. Radio stations don't want to play your singles, newspapers don't want to write about you; one of my colleagues even has a theory that the audience for dark, angsty guitar music - exactly the kind in which Muse specialise - has disappeared with the rise of ecstasy. The huge success of Radiohead may seem to refute this, but their fans are mostly in their twenties and thirties. Is there a serious possiblity that the army of moody adolescents who made stars of bands such as The Cure and The Smiths have deserted rock because the drugs keep them happy? Certainly, Muse have had to work a lot harder than most of their predecessors to get the modest success they've had to date (250,000 albums sold worldwide, a new single trying to fight its way into a Top 10 dominated by UK garage and teen-pop), but you could put that down to them simply not being good enough. Their first album, last year's Showbiz, though it contains four or five great songs, is too full of wearying bluster and derivative filler to be taken entirely seriously. Then again, so was Pablo Honey , Radiohead's largely forgotten debut. Thom Yorke and friends came good through constant touring and the onset of maturity. With an average age of 21, Muse are clearly in the same bracket - and, on the evidence of this intense, exciting show, heading in the right direction (though it's notable that most of the faces in the crowd look slightly older than those on stage). Of the 16 songs they played last Tuesday night, four are new, and shot through with a sense of confidence and ambition reminiscent of The Bends . Admittedly, critics have written similar things before about bands such as Strangelove and Geneva, only for them to fall by the commercial wayside, but Muse are different in several respects. They're a trio, so they're naturally leaner and more direct than a five-piece. Like most good rock bands, Muse lie somewhere between the antithetic poles of punk and prog - but on stage they're closer to Nirvana than to Pink Floyd. Having said that, there's more depth and density to the sound than you might expect. Matt Bellamy is an astounding vocalist, a ferociously accomplished guitarist and plays odd snatches of keyboard too; Chris Wolstenholme switches between bass guitar and an oddly shaped electric double bass; and Dominic Howard hits his drums scarily hard. Listening to Bellamy's tumbling, squealing falsetto and watching his hollow cheeks and staring eyes, the person who comes to mind is the late Jeff Buckley, though without quite the same level of animal charisma or vocal virtuosity. What really let Muse down, though, are the tunes. With a few golden exceptions - the arpeggio keyboard riff of 'Sunburn', the atypically gentle new single 'Unintended' - the songs are more dynamic than memorable. They need an anthem - a 'Creep' or a 'Smells Like Teen Spirit'. But at least this is rock played with vitality and without irony by a young British band. That in itself is pretty rare these days. When Muse trash their instruments at the end of the last song, 'Showbiz', it feels like neither a cliché nor a joke, just an exhilarating act of catharsis by three gangly boys. Now all they have to do is find some tormented teenagers to share their pain. Sam Taylor

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