With its grandiose, occasionally even grotesque combination of Radiohead's art-rock angst plus Queen's ebullient excess, Muse has been working its way to the top for more than a decade. Until recently, mass success in America somehow eluded it, but not anymore. Supporting its fifth album, "The Resistance," Muse filled the United Center on Friday night, and, having made it to the top, worked overtime to go over the top.Moving hydraulic platforms; lasers; shiny suits; rotating drum sets; LCD towers; giant, inflatable eyeballs; soaring solos; and falsetto vocals: Muse may hail from the U.K., but in terms of bombast and sheer spectacle, the band is tailor-made for the U.S. It's a wonder it took as long as it did to extend its global hold to these shores. There are far worse aspirations than ruling the world, at least for a rock band, and Muse wielded its technical prowess and mastery of technology like benevolent dictators, the virtuoso core trio of Matthew Bellamy, Christopher Wolstenholme and Dominic Howard (abetted by a keyboard player) soaking in all the ego-charging adulation, while still working nonstop to entertain.
For a band whose sweeping sci-fi, hard-rock-plus-synths songs frequently tweak totalitarianism (however generally), Muse can be a tad oppressive. Indeed, in less enthusiastic hands, the dystopian visions of songs such as "Uprising," "Unnatural Selection" and "Knights of Cydonia" would have been big bummers. But Muse performed each with such maximum anthemic aplomb that — boilerplate us-versus-them subject matter aside — victory never seemed in question. Despite the dire scenarios of Bellamy's songs, Muse is far from fighting for survival; it's celebrating winning the war. They are the champions.
