MUSE.

2 minute read

You have to evolve. Stagnation brings boredom. ~Matt Bellamy

MUSE are an English rock band born in 1994. Starting off with an alternative rock sound coming from the end of the grunge era, they climbed through billboards reaching international success with Black Holes and Revelations in 2006.
Their key is innovation: experimenting with sound is what make a small three-man band one of the most original rock bands of the modern era. With their late albums MUSE experimented with rock, pop, electronics, making a return to a more classic “hard rock” sound with Drones.
Their latest album is Will of the People and in 2023 the band is on World Tour: for this I wanna present you “MUSER.”, a playlist that covers my favourite songs from the band through their history.

Tip: I will go through each band member and each album giving some key songs to listen to. All the songs (and some more) are all included in the playlist.

Here is the firts song: Uprising. I chose this song to represent the whole band because I think it covers something of every member uniqueness in it. In fact, it is one of their most famous song.

Matt Bellamy

Frontman of the band, he plays guitar, piano and sings with an exceptional voice, characterized by high-pitch and falsetto parts. Despite this, he manages to convey every kind of emotion: joy and anger, passion and sadness. Besides being a fantastic composer, he takes care of his lyrics, often bringing up important themes.

Chris Wolstenholme

One of the bassist that inspired me the most it’s surely Chris, with its incredible and unique sound. He loves experimenting with sounds, ranging from classical ones to all synth-basses. However, its signature sound is a very bass-y and distorted sound, that I personally love. In fact, I recently bought a Big Muff PI a fuzz bass effect that reminds of his tone.
Fun fact: to better exploit his sound, he splits the signal coming from the bass in two. One goes to a clean amplifier and one to a distorted one, combining the two at the end helps maintaining that low bass notes very loud and bass-y.
Obviously, as his mates, it’s an exceptional composer and his riffs, often different from the guitar ones, help giving the bass a main character role.

Dominic Howard

Unfortunately I’m not a drummer (yet), but surely Dominic would be one of my reference drummers. Judging him technically it’s difficult, but as you’ll see he is able to give his drums more than just a background suond that keeps the tempo. The riffs he creates and the various drum licks make every song feel different and never boring.

Albums

Tip: For the albums I put two songs - The first one is a must listen what I think its the most representative of the album - The second one is just my personal favourite.

Tip: Keep in mind that the songs appeared before are not repeated - even if they are important!