Muse

UK trio Muse are noisy little boys. Originally from Devon , they've freaked out entire continents with their apocalyptic themes and wonderfully over-the-top sounds. Aliens, anthems and Nina Simone covers sit next to the pseudo space-age nonsense of something like Plug In Baby on previous albums, great and absolutely bizarre stuff. After hearing the band's newbie, 'Black Holes And Revelations', I had to break my golden rule. There are so many types of sounds on this record - what the hell were the boys influenced by while writing?

"I don't know if we were listening to any particular bands, I think between us the influences are pretty broad," begins Chris Wolstenholme, Muse's basist.

The old 'eclectic listening habits', your honour.

"I think listening to things outside the realms of traditional rock music, or traditional ideas of what rock bands usually do, I guess," he continues. "Things like film music have influenced a fair few of our tracks, especially the last three or four tracks on the album are influenced more by film music than they are actual guitar music."

Reading the titles on Muse's new album you would definitely expect a non-stop-block-of-rock and a whole lotta hair product. City Of Delusion sounds like a lyric The Darkness would love (surrounded by innuendo and a little 'ooh, er, vicar!', of course), and Knights Of Cydonia would easily sit in a Wolfmother set next to unicorns and tales of female devotion sung in falsetto.

Muse has been around for much longer than these raggamuffins, however, and compared to everyone from Rachmaninov to Radiohead. While comparisons are fair enough, the fact that Muse are still here to tell the tale says a lot, as do gongs like Best Live Act at the 2005 Brit Awards. 'Black Holes And Revelations' is Muse less frantic in sound but no less in intensity - the same wall of sounds with a danceable edge, when dance, of course, means jumping up and down like a dickhead with a few thousand of your nearest dearest friends.

"As much as we take the music seriously - and we take the music very seriously - the position we're in and what we do on a day-to-day basis is much harder to take seriously because we've all got much further than we ever thought we would do as a band. We don't take it for granted, there have been things that happened to us all individually that have made us all realise how lucky we are to be doing what we're doing.

"It's one of those things, and you see those bands that one minute are flavour of the month and the next thing have disappeared."

The things in between for Muse have been births, deaths and marriages as well as the doubling of their international audience and gaining kudos by headlining Glastonbury in 2004.

"I guess it was one of those festivals that you see when you're a kid, you see all these bands up on the main stage and I guess you just dream about it when you're young. To get up there was pretty amazing," Wolstenholme says about the show.

With rumours running around already about Muse and the Big Day Out 2006/7, the talk moves to festivals in general and whether it's all as good as it used to be.

"When we were going to festivals years ago it was obviously easier to get in. Capacity is something they use these days but people used to jump over the fence at Glastonbury which obviously can't happen anymore. There is something about having something that someone else can't have," he laughs. "I can remember the first time I went to a festival and having the ticket in my hand, I think it was just after my exams, and it was such a great feeling, it's not something you do everyday."

'Black Holes And Revelations' has a few quiet moments too, many of which deliver a semi-operatic overview of the world since their last album, 'Absolution'. Soldier's Poem is particularly potent, a mid-album breath-catcher that features swelling all-angles vocals as well as Muse's own brand of superfluousness.

While Matt Bellamy, Muse's frontman, is reported to "Not be ashamed to incite a small riot," by raising, well, general apathy levels with the new album (songs like Assassin that call for audiences to "Destroy demonocracy'), Wolstenholme sees the call to arms as symptomatic of having been caged up between albums.

"It is kind of crazy considering what's going on at the moment," he says of the global hype around the album and how quickly things continue to change on a world scale. "This is probably the longest period we've had between albums, just things like the anticipation of what people think the album will be. It's kind of a strange feeling."

How wonderfully strange they are.

Liz Giuffre

'Black Holes And Revelations' is out now through Warners.