Muse is not a band for stripping things down. Last night at the first of three concerts at Staples Center in Los Angeles, the British trio kept its reputation intact for flash and sweeping rock gestures. It was the second night of the band's U.S. tour behind The 2nd Law, Muse's sixth studio album, and it was heavy with ambitious new songs between heroic, earth-shuddering hits from the last dozen years.
Hardly a critical favorite, Muse is frequently dismissed as a band hewing too closely to their influences and replacing subtlety with helium-fueled intensity. But they know how to fill a stage, delivering their songs with energy and obsession, performing beneath an endlessly morphing pyramid of lights, lasers and flashing images.
Muse mingled brooding electronics with epic Queen-like flourishes and an of-the-moment taste of dubstep on The 2nd Law's "Unsustainable," which opened the show. One radio hit from the new album is "Madness," performed at human-scale as a gospel/U2 hybrid, in contrast to the explosive visuals: purple and blue lasers firing above the crowd and Matt Bellamy's dark glasses, with lenses that helpfully flashed lyrics for fans to sing along to the singer's breathless, emotional reading.
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