Scott McDonald

After years of living in the shadow of Radiohead, Muse demonstrate how to mesmerize a crowd of 90,000 on this live CD performance.

Muse have been around for almost 15 years, but the U.K. rock band finally made it big in the States with Black Holes & Revelations in 2006. Their new live CD/DVD, HAARP, captures the trio rocking 90,000 screaming fans on June 16, 2007, at Wembley Stadium in London. That's a lot of people.

The performance sounds effortless and razor-sharp – you can hear the goodness beginning on the Queen-inspired "Knights of Cydonia." Muse soar with the prog-rock mania on "Map of the Problematique," with some of the manipulated sounds blurring the line between keyboard and guitar. Then comes the searing drone that precedes Matt Bellamy's "Hurricane" – his guitar could be mistaken for whale sounds. After that comes "Starlight," with its angelic piano line making room for choppy guitars, and the epic "Time Is Running Out," on which the crowd starts to liven up again.

"This next song is a blast from the past," Matt Bellamy declares as he picks the acoustic guitar intro on "Unintended." You can almost see the fans igniting their lighters – well, more like cell phones these days – and swaying back and forth. Bellamy later breaks into an all-out falsetto, on "Micro-Cuts" – how he can go from operatic balladry to sheer tough-stuff guitar riffage in the same song is beyond me.

HAARP represents a band in peak form after years of dealing with comparisons as the poor man's Radiohead. Muse fuse prog-rock, metal riffs, electronic samples and even glam-rock into a triumphant collage of singles that people have grown to love. Ninety-thousand fans can't be wrong.


(Go check out the Reaper's Buzznet album review of In Flames' Sense of Purpose, and Panasonicyouth's review of Anti-Flag's The Bright Lights of America.)

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(Want to win a Muse special edition CD/DVD combo of HAARP? Click here.)