Album Review, Muse, "The Resistance"

The Resistance is Muse's most ambitious album yet: extravagant, technically accomplished, epic rock providing a solid setting for Matt Bellamy’s swooping, mercurial falsetto. Crucially, there's newfound warmth to the vocals, notably on Undisclosed Desires and the anthemic Uprising.

At times, they overreach themselves and fall flat on their faces, and the concept of love's struggles in a dark, futuristic world probably plays better to the fertile paranoia of adolescence than to the emotional equilibrium of a more mature demographic. But when they can create the Chopin-inspired headrush of United States Of Eurasia (Collateral Damage) and the brilliantly executed, three-part, 15-minute-long, apocalyptic Exogenesis Symphony, then you can just about forgive them their more indulgent and eccentric excesses. Prog-rock for the 21st century: whoever said it would go away?

Mark Liddell
Metropolis
13th November, 2009

Revenge...?

Riff Raff was a legendary rock magazine based in London in the late 1980s and 1990s. Edited by the ultimate music biz insider, Mark Crampton, and employing such talents as Mark Blake, Jerry Ewing, Mike Harris, Paul Smith, Chris Collingwood, Alan McCrorie, Simon Robinson, Lyn Guy, Anna Marx, Nick Douglas, Marion Garden, Peter "Grunty" Grant, Joe "The Crow" Mackett, Billy "The Kluck" Kulke, and, lastest and mostest, the incredible Liddell Brothers, Mark (a.k.a. "El Perro") and Colin (a.k.a. "Der Fly"). Unfortunately, Riff Raff was just too R n' R for its own good. A genuine working class rock mag, written, edited, and translated into 16 European languages in a drug-N-Jack-D-fuelled haze, often on the back of motorbikes, with spell checking by our staff of attentive rock bimbos (chosen purely for their blondeness and big knockers), it soon fell behind more trainspotterly, nerdish, and politically correct publications like Q, Kerrang, Mojo, Metal Hammer, and Horse & Hound. This website is an archive and kind of shrine dedicated to the writing of its greatest writers, some of whom, luckily for the Rock Kosmos, still continue to write about music. This is the REVENGE of Riff Raff...Rock on!