Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we revisit the grandiose British rock band’s second album, a supranatural space odyssey powered by all-too-human emotion.
In 2001, on a Saturday-morning show with celebrity guests and a slime tank, a rakish man appears onstage with hair spiked into dyed black blades. The man is a little scary, a little sinister, like anyone cool. He wears dark shades and wiggles his arms, conjuring a lullaby from the keyboard like a hired magician. Then the guitar swings around his neck and he summons a perfect squall of distortion.
The song, introduced as “New Born,” begins to overwhelm him. He throttles the guitar, hops about the stage, barely pretends to sing and play. You know he is miming, but he also performs the artifice of mime—that is, he is miming miming—and as the credits roll another man bursts in and inexplicably breakdances. What are you watching? A satire of an empty TV spectacle, perhaps. Unless you are nine years old. At nine, you are witnessing genius.
By this point, Matthew Bellamy’s heavy rock laments had already won Muse a global cult, gripped by his softness and oddness. But that is not how the British trio got to be stars. For that, they were shipped out to studio sets for Live & Kicking and The Pepsi Chart Show, learning to peddle the shamelessly real while embracing the shamelessly fake. By the end of it, Bellamy could fluently translate his grandiose, pentatonic misery into four minutes of thrillingly throwaway pop. Stuff would get smashed, but most of the time he was freakishly good at the job.
To straddle the sincere and absurd, the real and fake, was never a stretch for a man who did not resemble his straight-faced Britrock contemporaries so much as the swaggering peacocks of ’70s glam. Before his myriad quirks congealed into lovable schtick, and arena floodlights greeted Muse’s rebirth as prog-pop conspiracists, the band released a pair of fascinating LPs: 2003’s pop opus Absolution and their 2001 space odyssey, the formidable Origin of Symmetry.
Origin of Symmetry depicts life as the school-friend trio of Bellamy, bassist Chris Wolstenholme, and drummer Dom Howard saw it: a war zone where tyrant guitars and drums vie for space with balletic miniatures and stargazing synths. Muse were playing melodrama as teenage realism, an extremely, ridiculously honest noise. My sense they were overblown—that scaling the heights of psychic tumult might not require galactic pomp and an actual jetpack—would take a few years to kick in. In the meantime, I listened to Origin of Symmetry as if to a documentary. “Space dementia in your eyes/And peace will arise and tear us apart,” Bellamy sang, machines clipping his voice to a slithery alien rasp. Wow, yes, I thought, frowning seriously into my lunchbox.
Formed in the seaside town of Teignmouth, Muse signed their first deal in 1998 in Los Angeles, before amassing a giant fanbase in continental Europe. Their province back home transpired not to be London (too jaded and skeptical) but rather in pockets of smalltown and middle Britain, where latent ambition and stifled bombast can thrive among thwarted romantics. Where Is This It, released two weeks later, garnered the Strokes a coalition of hedonists and neurotics drawn to the big city, Origin of Symmetry positioned Muse as an outpost of Radiohead’s broad church of the alienated.
The album soundtracked a pipeline out of outsiderdom for suburban students and scruffy skate kids—the next generation of techno gourmands and bong-ripping metalheads, math-rock nerds and hardcore loyalists. For at least the next decade, slapdash “Plug in Baby” covers blasted from provincial pub stages, anointing a new mainstay on the popular front of radio rock. To legions of longhair disciples, Origin of Symmetry sounded a final alarm before the tractor beam of domesticity beckoned, promising annual trips to Download Fest and pet cats curled up in Korn hoodies. The album’s cult has endured not so much by converting new fans as by presenting a pungent memory box.
Muse themselves never stopped being teenagers, happiest whipping up us-versus-them screeds and epic expansions of boyish obsessions. But nor would they nail adolescence with such panache as they do on their second LP. Origin of Symmetry romanticizes a time when pop was primal, titanic, and camp. By combining goth vulnerability with sci-fi scale and hard-rock drama, it captures a paradox of young romance: On one hand, Bellamy sounds wracked with despair, but he proclaims his heartbreak with the glee of an ecstatic preacher. Origin of Symmetry’s mercurial range honors those dueling emotions: in “Space Dementia”’s barbarian opera, “Feeling Good”’s benevolent vaudeville, “Bliss”’s Nintendo-prog fantasia, “Plug in Baby”’s widdly licks.
Their radio A-list forebears were the mannered realists of kitchen-sink Britpop, whose fetish for authenticity had awakened an everyman army of Coldplays and Travises. Across the pond, grunge had transformed goofball rock into lucrative torment, unloosing a glut of disaffected Nirvana clones. Muse’s debut, Showbiz, tried the self-serious angst thing, too. But Bellamy, emboldened by nu-metal’s reign, was nudging it into the hyperbolic. He sang with real pain—Muse are ruthlessly unironic—and channeled Berlioz and Mahler, minting a sound so ludicrously over-the-top it broke the serious/piss-take binary.
Despite little retrospective attention, Showbiz had been a commercial success, outselling higher-profile late-’90s records by bands like the Offspring and Korn. From a backwater filled with “a load of old biddies” (as Wolstenholme put it), the debut had flung Muse into orbit—playing arenas with the Foos and the Chilis and prancing about at their backstage parties. As his ego played catch-up, Bellamy dubbed Showbiz “a bit faffy and bollocks.” He had reacquainted himself with the mischievous Russian composer Rachmaninoff: both traditionalists in accelerating worlds, fond of naive melodies that sweep and lurch into sudden turbulence. Inspirited, Bellamy delayed the second album sessions to dispense with faff and bollocks.
Finally, in a rural English studio abutting a field of magic mushrooms, Muse and Tool producer Dave Bottrill recorded “New Born,” “Bliss,” “Darkshines,” and “Plug in Baby”—the latter while tripping. (They wound up “naked in a jacuzzi,” with Bellamy “deaf in one ear from falling asleep in the sauna,” he told the writer Ben Myers.) The earthy energies lingered when they reunited with Showbiz producer John Leckie, who filled their studios with percussive animal bones, llama-claw necklaces, and wind chimes for ceremonial clanging, as well as introducing the band to madcap bards Tom Waits and Captain Beefheart.
By then, their songwriting had already transformed, sometimes subtly and sometimes not. The riff and chorus of “Hyper Music” could have come from the debut, but not the flirty flair of the pinball-bumper bassline, nor the playful, fuzzy jangle that drops us into the verse. The vocal production sensationalizes the falsetto that writhes loose from Bellamy’s body—his revelry in every wet gasp before he belts out another battle cry.
At the same time, amid the clamor, Bellamy oozes sensuality. He groans like a four-poster bed, elongating “ooh”s with erotic decadence. It is possible for the casual listener to imagine the frontman a meat-and-potatoes rocker, conjuring women as shallow conduits of lust and disdain. Then he tickles you with a quietly odd lyric like the ones that pepper “Bliss”:
Give me the peace and joy in your mind.
Everything about you is how I’d wanna be.
That second one in particular, innocuous as it sounds, strikes me as wonderfully offbeat. Bellamy identifies not with the conquest but with the object of desire. It is a sentiment closer to sexually ambivalent goth (as in “Why Can’t I Be You?”) than downtuned, guitar-slinging rock.
Bellamy uses operatics to act out gender transgression, albeit while taking equal relish in what makes rock machismo click. The desire to be “over-the-top,” he said in 2001, “is inside every human being on the planet, but sexism has said that that was female….None of us are embarrassed about expressing [our] feminine side.” In lyrics delivered with enough falsetto and tremolo to shatter a mirror, his submissive “Space Dementia” narrator practically begs for emasculation. “I love all the dirty tricks and twisted games you play,” he snarls, quivering with hammy deviance. The tension lies in his tightrope walk from the sub- to the super-human, balancing claims of being a lowly worm with flashes of the sublime.
Where other virtuoso bands would marry rock with opera, Muse present the two in the midst of a messy divorce. The obliterating power of “New Born” derives from the contrast between its devilish riff and its intro, the saintly piano lullaby. “Citizen Erased,” a metallic storm, concludes with a piano coda drenched in post-apocalyptic bliss. In downtime throughout the record, where others would merely solo, Bellamy ferrets away glitzy cadenzas and sanctuaries of stillness. Muse’s sadness, like their ecstasy, is always joyfully lavish.
In press around the release, an increasingly inscrutable Bellamy outed himself as a conspiracy theorist, perhaps playing the media the same way he had played the keyboard on Live & Kicking. Aliens had planted ancient star charts on tablets in Middle Eastern catacombs. The U.S. government was performing mind control with radiation and electronics. All this made his zeal for advanced science hard to parse. Pinched from the physicist Michio Kaku, Origin of Symmetry’s title alludes to an outcrop of string theory describing an apparent symmetry of matter in a mooted 11th dimension. To find its origin, as Bellamy understood it, could lead to a sort of god. In the frontman’s personal universe, the source of stability—the origin of symmetry—was the act of creating music, he said. “Plug in Baby,” then, is as much an ode to his mythic guitar as a riff on dystopian tech.
Hallucinatory themes aside, the tone of the lyrics is painfully human, laced with spite. Lies are exposed, bitterness festers, toxic relationships crumble. (Bellamy’s endless press digressions about science and tech may have been, in the end, another bit of misdirection. It sounds to me like a breakup album.) Whatever the cause, antagonism suits him. He sings best in the role of a man possessed: so wretched and pained that histrionics seize him unbidden, expelling bile from his lungs.
In the calm that falls near the album’s end, Bellamy struggles for gravitas. Finale “Megalomania” takes a big plunge into gothic balladry but slightly bungles the landing, overestimating the depth of its existential lyric and stately organ soundscape. “Feeling Good,” as made miraculous by Nina Simone, wants to meander and kick its heels but here feels overcooked, a show tune stiffened with jazz-lounge starch. For now, at least, Muse’s powers would wane the further they ventured from their trademark gaudy discord.
But for six or seven songs—before the side-B slump, before the rock monoculture collapsed and they blasted off into stadium bluster—Muse were briefly the mightiest band in the world. Origin of Symmetry’s endurance, if nothing else, humiliates their former U.S. label Maverick, which reportedly buried the record upon Bellamy’s refusal to re-record “Plug in Baby” with manlier vocals. (The band left their contract as the album hit the UK Top 3, before a belated U.S. release in 2005.)
This year’s impressive new mix and remaster, billed as the XX Anniversary RemiXX, is even more colossal and timeless. It smooths out period giveaways like “New Born”’s dustbin-lid drums and scratchy rhythm guitar, while amplifying the baroque grandeur of the irrepressibly mad “Micro Cuts.” “Space Dementia”’s puny strings become Hollywood symphonic. Bonus track “Futurism,” initially cut over fears of flubbing it live, assumes its rightful place as a second-half pick-me-up. The reissue is definitive.
“If it wasn’t for Muse,” Bellamy once said, “I think I’d be a nasty, violent person.” And if rock is the space reserved for that rage—where bottled-up people (particularly people presented as men) can reach a new emotional tenor—then he may be right: The greatest achievement of bands like Muse is preventing literal murder. To take a humbler view, Origin of Symmetry is propaganda for self-indulgence. In a precarious adolescence, music like this can awaken a brewing madness, summon it up like a haunted shipwreck from a lake and say, “Come take a look—this is actually pretty cool!” Muse’s ilk will always be saving lives in this way or that, looking to mollify teenage mania. But few insist so persuasively that the mania, too, is a gift.
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