Love is our resistance.I am currently listening to Muse's new Album, The Resistance, and I dare say that it is such a kaleidoscope of ethereal auditory imagery, that takes your soul and rips it apart. You feel the pain, you feel the agony, you feel the depression, you feel the loneliness, and you feel the sense of hopelessness. At least for the front part of the album.
Going along the journey, which I am inclined to believe that it resembles one Dante or Orwell took in Inferno and 1984, you start to experience a whole other sensation - healing. With soft, melancholy undertones and other-worldly blasts of quiet existence, you realise, that with the inclusion of the second half, the album is actually very nicely framed into a journey of sorts, which is why I make the reference to Dante.
At times, it sounds very much like Queen, in all its theatrical stageplay. At other times, I could see Middle Earth. I think that the use of string instruments has been very compelling in producing this effect, as well as bringing in the Middle Eastern and Indian influence to their sound. Of note, this album continues the Muse sound, and differs little with Absolution or Black Holes and Revelations.
I have listened to the album thrice over now, and in all times, I found something curiously similar. Towards the end of the album, I felt that my heart was so heavy, so burdened and an abysmal vision coloured my eyes and my mind. On all three times, I then frantically tried to search for other, more lighthearted songs on my playlist which could alleviate the pain. For those of you who know me well, you would know that that is not easy.
In any case, at first, I thought it was the experience of what it felt like to die. Surely, the pain, the torture, and yet the alluring estacy were testaments of such a feeling. But no, I grew to realise that it was much more, much deeper, much darker. And then I think it hit me. The torment, the tribulation, the suffering, the distress and the affliction upon me, was not of my own death, but of everyone around me. There is nothing more torturous, woeful and despairing than that. And perhaps therein lies the album's thesis, with the band's muse coming from spirit of the world.
Everyone in the world fighting, and surviving, and living, and loving, and hating, and dying... they are all me, and they are all you. The night has reached its end, and I fear that we will not live, when I observe how the morning arrives.
