The Leeds Scenester
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Muse - Leeds Festival
If I were writing a preface to this review it would be that Muse are bloody brilliant live, and Origin of Symmetry is an exceptional album. And yet playing the album in its entirety to a cold, rain-soaked Leeds crowd seemed a curious choice for a festival set.
Speaking to the NME before Leeds and Reading, Matt Bellamy explained the reason behind playing the album in full: “it’s always been an album the hardcore fans have always talked about as one of their favourites, if not the favourite. So, we wanted to play it for them as a celebration of the 10 years since it came out...” Nice sentiment, but not one shared by the majority of the uninspired crowd, desperate to hear something they knew.
True, Muse treated us to an audio-visual spectacular with a production that defied the limitations of a festival stage, but it took a whole hour before the crowd really began to appreciate it as the trio finally brought out the big-hitters ‘Supermassive Black Hole’, ‘Hysteria’ and ‘Time is Running Out’, finishing the night with the space rock epic ‘Knights of Cydonia’. Hardcore Muse fans with an appreciation of the band’s marriage of love for Rachmaninoff and Rage Against the Machine? No, just kids at a festival wanting to mosh around to something they’d heard of.
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In spite of the largely unappreciated tribute to a ten year old album, Muse remained the consummate professionals, delivering a flawless performance entwining heavy guitar riffs with beautiful piano and haunting operatic falsettos. The light show was nothing short of epic, and the video backdrop was truly out-of-this-world (think aliens, giant cartoon animals, marching robots and pulsating brains). Even the rain that night was of biblical proportions and perfectly suited to Bellamy’s apocalyptic anthems. What a shame that Muse at Leeds was not of another dimension.
Anouska Semp
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