It’s always a scary thing for me as a fan to put up my hand to review my favourite band. What if it sucks? What if I can’t get into it? This has been my first-world struggle as long as I’ve been a writer, and leading up to this week I’ve been back in that familiar head vs heart battle.
Muse have dropped their new single, “Unravelling”, and having listened to it multiple times over the week I can honestly say I’m really enjoying it – more with each listen, as is often the case with their songs. Kicking off with a chant of the song title which fades into a synth pattern, it starts out relatively gently. Matt Bellamy’s trademark vocals pull you in with a lilting rise and fall up through the first verse and pre-chorus – where the teased lyric “an insect trapped in amber” resides, and then suddenly things get heavier and more urgent with the addition of Dom Howard’s drums and Chris Wolstenholme’s bass. I’m pretty sure that’s a Wolstenholme screaming harmony of the title, too, just before the chorus kicks in.
The second verse and pre-chorus echo the first, then the chorus again, with lyrics of “feeling the glow die inside of our bones, this is a hymn for our love, with no god, and no throne”.
It’s now that my favourite version of Muse appears. The bridge is full of cracking drums, soaring Bellamy guitar solo, and yet another Wolstenholme melodic bass line to make you salivate. When Muse get down and dirty it’s so, so good. I can easily imagine headbanging along to this at a gig (that is, of course, should Muse favour Australia and NZ with tour dates in their next world tour). I love it when I can feel my cells recalibrating from a sonic assault, and the back end of this track certainly reset my cells multiple times this week. I am definitely unravelled, in the best possible way.
Images supplied by the artist
