Muse – Madness
We don’t love Radiohead either!
[Video][Website]
[3.86]
Anthony Easton: The move towards authenticity as an aesthetic and erotic strategy leads to a kind of obsessive whining, plus the least convincing call towards “madness” in recent memory. Also, the fakest orgasm sounds since Meg Ryan.
[1]
Patrick St. Michel: Better than what I expected after the Muse-goes-brostep album trailer. The band is still copping most of their moves from Radiohead but the song’s slow build actually pays off at the end.
[5]
Iain Mew: “Madness” is the latest in a long line of tidy Muse electro ballads. It does its job well enough and manages to build in a couple of Queen moments near-seamlessly. The problem is that I hear those dubstep vworps and think back to “Survival” and more gloriously ridiculous Muse singles of the past and the fact that they decided to use them for something as tasteful as this is too massive a waste of potential to be happy with.
[4]
Jonathan Bogart: Comparing their use of synthesizers in a rock context to Who’s Next would be playing right into their greedy-for-classic-rock-acclaim hands, but on the other hand it’s hard to come up with a more boring comparison.
[5]
Alfred Soto: How much for those synthesized orgasms behind the window?
[2]
Brad Shoup: Just when I resigned myself to appreciating Muse for their inability to stop sabotaging themselves with aural grins (this was right around the five-part harmonized treatment), the In Queenbows approach yields to straight-faced release and an approximation of guitar chime without delay effects. Good enough.
[6]
Sabina Tang: To quote a recent Owen Pallett tweet, “After a week of experimenting I can safely say there’s no future in this Italian-Cantonese fusion idea.” Which is a pity, because when the song goes full-out dimsum three minutes in it properly soars.
[4]