Dom and Tom at Kelston Christmas Party in mid-90s

FIRST OPINION

It's perhaps inevitable that Keane's debut album, Hopes and Fears, will draw numerous comparisons to Coldplay. Like them, Keane were discovered by indie label Fierce Panda, who released a single (Everybody's Changing). And, like Coldplay, Keane also do a fine trade in catchy and heartfelt indie-pop, all bruised verses and soaring choruses. But though their sound is sure to please fans of Coldplay and Travis, the reality is that Keane manage to sound that little bit more delicate. This could be down to the band's relatively unusual make-up: rather than guitars, the trio use a piano.

At its best, Hopes and Fears is reminiscent of Bends-era Radiohead and singer Tom Chaplin's voice is closer to Thom Yorke's falsetto then Chris Martin's cracked whine. On tracks such as the hit single Somewhere Only We Know, they manage to squeeze an epic-sounding poignancy from their stripped-down sound (a lot of this is due to the album's superb production). Across 12 tracks, all this slow-burning melancholy skates a bit close to self-indulgence and you can't help but wish they'd rock out a bit. But Hopes and Fears is still a remarkable and surprisingly mature debut album from a young band with a bright future.

FOURTH OPINION

What a treat this new album from Keane is! Every track is well written, strong in its own right and above all else, extremely musical. There are similarities with other British bands, particularly Travis, but i'd rather have that than some cheap boyband attempt with only 3 singles worth of anything worth having!! Buy this album, and you will not be disappointed. I'm sure this will be in the awards for best of 2004 next year.

Album of 2004, Brit Awards

Hopes and Fears

1. Somewhere Only We Know
2. Bend and Break
3. We Might As Well Be Strangers
4. Everybody's Changing
5. Your Eyes Open
6. She Has No Time
7. Can't Stop Now
8. Sunshine
9. This is the Last Time
10. On A Day Like Today
11. Untitled I
12. Bedshaped
 

Allusion Gig
Ronan M.

The Kelston Christmas Party

Just for a laugh we played at our local youth
group in Wandsworth. My brother was able to join us and sing the vocals, as we covered She don't use Jelly by the Flaming Lips and The Software Slump by Granddaddy (which got a good laugh).

Then Allusion finished the night off properly with Alex's typical chickenesque neck thrusts and movements like a member of Spinal Tap. Joe looked like Ringo Star denied an acid trip, and me there bent over my incredibly small mic stand.

Good Luck Song

I wonder this evening
Will it ever get easy?
That you jump to this beat
And forget all of your problems
So therefore you will know
I made this song for youuu

...I stumble on
For you I can’t go wrong

So maybe it doesn't even matter
And maybe I wonder...

The Beginning Stages of Completion

1 Sweet Pie
2 Good Luck Song
3 Perfect
4 Fog It
5 Head To The Ceiling
6 Tin Can Bashin
7 Wilfred Owen
8 Trajectory
9 Sunday and Civil
 

To see the light of day
Your stars are spinning my planets away

By Cliff C.

Jon D insisted – I would definitely like jazz! I resisted. It was a certainty in my mind, just as much as the opposite was a certainty in Jon’s mind. My father was and is a great fan of traditional swing jazz, but I felt completely unable to appreciate music that I considered uninteresting and predictable.

Remaining serenely confident, Jon gave me Times Squared and Best of the Yellow Jackets. The songs ‘Free Day’ and ‘57 Chevy’ were nice, but all the others confirmed my trenchant stance. ‘Hunter’s Point’ was excruciating! I listened, and re-listened. I tried, re-tried, and tired.

One Sunday Jon was returning from giving a music lesson, clutching a bunch of CDs. Looking at one, he said ‘You won’t like this.’ I asked him to leave it anyway and I eventually put it on. The first track changed my life! Well, my jazz perceptions. The first bar knocked me out, literally! Coming round, I realised I was listening to the biggest selling jazz album of all time, Kind of Blue by the trumpeter Miles Davis, and the song just voted by Jazz FM listeners as the greatest of all, ‘So What’. In 1959 Miles Davis painstakingly put together handpicked musicians to record experimentally, wanting to get away for the intricate chord sequences that had become the norm in jazz. He supplied the melody and no more than a couple of chords. Each musician was to make his own way around those chords by freely going up and down the scale of the chords with skilled improvisation (okay, I know nothing about music theory!). I had discovered the world of modal jazz.

The floodgates opened. Jon supplied me with the names of players to look for as I raided the local library and also Jon’s collection – Giant Steps by the tenor saxophonist John Coltrane, Silence by Keith Jarrett, From the Heart by Gary Husband, Timeless Tales by Joshua Redman, Bill Evan’s Blue in Green, Kind of Blue and Milestones by Miles Davis, John McLaughlin’s Extrapolation, and Wayne Shorter’s Footprints. And these for a starter!

Previously, I would enthuse over progressive rock (Radiohead, King Crimson, Muse, The Mars Volta, Pink Floyd) or progressive trance (Future Sound of London, Juno Reactor, The Orb) or hard trance DJs (Armin Van Buuren, Sasha & Digweed, Paul Van Dyk). With a little investigation, imagine my surprise when I found that modal jazz is also called progressive jazz! I have now concluded that the appeal to me in all three, intellectually, is offbeat harmony. This is the same for my taste in design, architecture, and art.

Modal Jazz

Take a listen to ‘So What’ and ‘All Blues’ from Kind of Blue and ‘Cousin Mary’ and Naima’ from Giant Steps. Typically in jazz, a soloist would play a solo that would fit into a set of chords. With modal jazz, he would create a melody in one scale and then make the melody itself the source of interest. Basically, you are improvising around one note (staying in one mode, and thus on the one chord). Modes, I read, are solitary scales in one key at a time. They are scales containing a predetermined selection of notes. In modal music these take the place of the major and minor scales.

Since fewer chords are used, the soloist can be more adventurous since he is not being pushed on by rapid chord changes and can thus concentrate on the melody. If you like, good modal solos pile on layers of chords over the base chord. Next one needs to have a different way of thinking about harmony. Certain harmonies are implied within these modes with any chord patterns simplified right down. The offbeat harmony comes when moving from notes within a mode that are dissonant with the prime chord of that mode.

It is the fact that you can do so much musically within such modal music that is truly astounding for me. Freeze all obvious harmonies, crank up the melody, and look for your harmony elsewhere. It is intellectually stimulating because I don’t know where the musician is going to wandering off to and there is no rush for him to go off anywhere else. He is free to explore and innovate. He can be progressive!
 

Muse Live

Absolution, by M Foster

Muse remain the ultimate acquired taste. Bombastic, over-dramatic and often progressive in style, listeners usually decide to hate them with a passion, or pronounce them the greatest thing in the history of the world. Absolution is their third studio album, and while it's clear it will appear to more people (It seems to shed Origin Of Symmetry's raw edge), there is no sign that Muse are about to settle down and become complacent. Even if you do hate them.

Absolution's general theme is that the world is going to end and we are all going to die. This is reflected on the opening power-surge of "Apocalypse Please", with its driving, almost military drums, and panicking cries of "This Is The End/The End/Of The World". "Apocalypse Please" won't have done much to convince you otherwise if you thought Muse were a tad over-the-top before, but, if the rest of the album is anything to go by, Muse, or at least enigmatic frontman Bellamy, seem perfectly happy to be seen as eccentrics.

The next track comes in the form of the album's most hook-laden track; "Time Is Running Out". A brilliantly catchy pop-rock track, with a bassline to die for, it doesn't break any new ground, for sure, but if it doesn't stick in your head for the next week or two, there's something wrong with you.

This is followed by the magnificent "Sing For Absolution". This sweeping mini-epic is both beautiful and tragic, and marks a real songwriting development from the band who once rhymed "Happening Soon" with "My Direction".

Next up is "Stockholm Syndrome". This is one of Muse's heaviest tracks, an out-and-out rock track that screams panic, desertion and loneliness like Thom Yorke on speed. Again, you will love it, or loathe it with a passion. The falsetto will either drive you to kill or transport you to someplace else. We're sure Muse would be happy with either.

After the explosive outro to Stockholm Syndrome, an acoustic track turns up to politely put all the pieces back together, in the form of "Falling Away With You". The beautiful simplicity of this track's introduction, with Bellamy's soft and saddened vocals over a simple acoustic guitar allows listeners to catch their breath before a typically Muse bridge leads to plenty of distortion and a bellowing chorus. It isn't the greatest track on the album, but serves as a nice breather before the next track hits you.

There's a brief electric interlude before the pumping and aggressive bassline of the shallow but wholly enjoyable "Hysteria" comes crashing down on you. It's heavy, it's loud and it knows it's got no substance ("I want it now/I want it now/Give Me Your Heart And Your Soul") but if this doesn't get you moving, nothing else on this album will.

As with the "Stockholm Syndrome"/"Falling Away With You" contrast, "Hysteria" is followed by "Blackout". A slowly-building and simmering track, this showcases Bellamy's vocals at their finest, and his songwriting at it's most sensitive, "This Life's Too Good To Last/And I'm Too Old To Dream".

The true highlight of the album is to be found in the next track; "Butterflies and Hurricanes" is the epitome of everything Muse are about. It's five minutes long. It's got a huge classical piano solo for a bridge midway through. It's absolutely ridiculous. But it's also incredible listening. You can't deny that Bellamy, Wolstenholme and Howard are three of the finest musicians of the 21st century, and this song, with its hopeful, simple and powerful message "You've got to change the world/And Use This Chance To Be Heard/ Your Time Is Now" could be applied to Muse themselves, now standing on the edge of huge success or to anyone who's ever felt downtrodden. It takes a few listens to appreciate just how much there is going on in this track, but it's most certainly the best thing Muse have done, even surpassing "Citizen Erased", Origin Of Symmetry's most memorable track.

Of course, with such an incredible centre-piece, one would expect Muse to stumble and lose this momentum for the rest of the album. Not so. "The Smallprint" is an aggressive burst of well-refined punk power that sees Bellamy almost spit his lyrics over a chunky bass line and roaring guitar riff. In the most polite, Devon-raised way, of course. This is followed by arguably the album's weakest track, "Endlessly", a simple, electronica-inspired love song which, while good in its own right, feels rather out of place in the context of Absolution. Muse should be applauded for trying something different, but, at 14 tracks long, Absolution really doesn't need any filler.

The closing two tracks seem well coupled. "Thoughts Of A Dying Atheist" returns to the guitar-led paranoia, "It scares the hell out of me/ When the end is all I can see" with an excellent sense of rhythm and driving pace. "Ruled By Secrecy" is a - whisper it - Radiohead-style tale of Government oppression, mundane working conditions and piano-led crooning. It's all pretty haunting stuff, and the moment where the piano hits its climax is particularly powerful.

When all's said and done, Muse have made an epic record. It's a rollercoaster of human emotion. It's equal parts loud and proud, equal parts sensitive and vulnerable. It is the end of the world, and a celebration of life on one flat, blue disk. It's a brilliant record. At times the scale of it is simply staggering. The thought that this was the brainchild of three incredibly talented Brits is something to be very proud of. Sure, it's not a perfect record. But Muse really can only go onto bigger, better, and perhaps sillier things from here.
 

Live concert recorded in October
2001 at Le Zenith in Paris

Watched at Kelston

Filmed towards the end of their 2001 tour at Le Zenith, Paris, this gig is full of high-powered chords and dramatic instrument torture as Muse pump through songs from their three albums to that date, including tracks from the B-side album Hullabaloo released with the DVD. The Devon trio show off their musical prowess with a powerful 90-minute concert, showcasing all their best tracks, kicking off with Dead Star.

Muse's stage presence alone for this performance makes you realise why you just have to see them playing live for yourself. They perform outstanding live versions of greats such as New Born, Sunburn, Feeling Good and the closing number Bliss. A grand total of 28 cameras were used, including cameras in the audience, on the band's instruments, and even one on Matt Bellamy's microphone. The camera work and special effects added to the show but over-zealous editing can make some scenes visually overwhelming.

The montage of audience vs stage action offers not so much a sense of being at the gig in person, but more an omnipresent sensation, getting up close and personal with the band while being hit by an onslaught of colours and split frames. The camera does tend to fall out of focus on occasions, but this just complements the raw sound of the gig.

2001 was not just Muse's year but the year when British rock gained a much-needed injection of energy after years of indie jangling.