Muse — Drones | The Quietus

Muse

Drones

Well, now, it seems that the multi-million selling combo Muse, the Nirvana-inspired Prog rock band of note, have released a new album entitled Drones. It’s a concept album, if you will, which seeks to paint in rock musical colours a harrowing, Orwellian picture of a world reduced to a totalitarian state, in which mysterious men in cloaks pull the levers (as depicted in the album’s striking artwork) and vast, controlling machines eat away at the soul of the individual, killing all dead.

F*** me with the wet end of a guided f***ing missile that’s accidentally landed in a giant tub of f***ing horseshit, the f***ing swear word hasn’t been coined that’s sufficiently f***ing potent enough to convey just what a jawdroppingly, pants-chewingly, arse-achingly abysmal f***ing album these serially offending c***wits have come up with this time round! To call it "utter bollocks" would a f***ing insult even to the meanest, sweatiest pair of bollocks! I would in all seriousness consider my time to have been more rewardingly spent if I’d pressed my f***ing ear up against the bollocks of a random f***ing bloke on the tube for 53 f***ing minutes than listened to the toxic f***ing barrel of rancid elephant smegma that is Drones! Can you imagine the internal agonies of whatever poor c*** of a f***ing record company executive had to experience every last minute of this pompous, incoherent, incontinent, beyond-laughable, addled, 112th rate, thunderously f***ing vacuous tower of toss? "Well, this is what they pay me the big bucks for," he’d have told himself as he fought down the united, shrieking chorus of every last fibre in his f***ing being, urging him to grab that arpeggiated arsehole Matt Bellamy, punch him in that f***ing horrible little face of his that’s way too f***ing small for his f***ing head,, kick him up the arse and propel him haircut first into his f***ing water cooler! It’s meant to evoke the spirit of 1984 and that it f***ing does! The year in which the big, empty f***ing drum programmes of Phil Collins, Howard Jones and The f***ing Eurythmics stamped like a boot on a human face for what felt like f***ing forever! A harrowing future in which every f***ing major band from f***ing Coldplay to f***ing Mumford & Sons to these c***s would by authoritarian decree sound like an even blander f***ing U2! Put it another way; if, back in the day, Freddie Mercury had shagged Bono, Muse are what would have subsequently dribbled from the Irishman’s f***ing anus!

Track one! ‘Dead Inside’. And here’s where we get to the f***ing gist of our bold, latterday Winston Smith’s f***ing hissy, histrionic f***ing whining, that reverberates through the f***ing album like the cries of an old man in a hospital ward who’s been kicked in the f***ing testicles by a horse! What is this terrible event that will "unleash a million drones"? A collapse of the political system? A superbug laying low civilisation? No! He can’t get a f***ing shag! And that, of course, is the girl’s f***ing fault for not recognising his f***ing fascinating intensity! "You like to give an inch/Whilst I am giving infinity [C***, by the way, for using f***ing "whilst"!] . . .You’ve taught me to lie without a trace/And kill with no remorse." Get the message, females? It’s thanks to your f***ing shallowness and indifference to Matt f***ing Bellamy’s cock that you’ve created the killing machine that will rampage across the rest of this f***ing album! I hope you’re happy!

Then there’s ‘Psycho’, borne on a f***ing riff so aimlessly f***ing stodgy and mouldy even f***ing Deep Purple would have hesitated to f***ing use it! Followed by "Mercy"! "Men in cloaks always seem to run the show/Save me, from the ghosts and shadows before they eat my soul", warbles Bellamy, like he’s having his f***ing gonads sandpapered by an over-fussy mother! Save you? I wouldn’t f***ing hand you a bogbrush if you’d fallen down a toilet bowl and were drowning in your own piss, you pitiful little twat!

Now ‘Reapers’, with Bellamy caterwauling like someone is manually rotating a pineapple wedged halfway up his f***ing arse at irregular f***ing intervals! More lyrical crap about killing and drones which has long since ceased to make any f***ing narrative sense! And now we really get busy with the f***ing "flight of the bumblebee" cod-classical stylings that remind you of those f***ing albums you used to get with titles like K-Tel Presents – Rock On, Beethoven! The Sounds Of 1796 Recreated In The Synthesized Styles Of 1976! Somewhere, a f***ing music teacher needs to be taken outside and f***ing executed! More of the f***ing same shite on ‘The Handler’!

And so it f***ing drones on – vague doggerel about conformism, machines, society, breaking free and rebelling, all delivered with so little f***ing specificity and context a f***ing Fox News anchorman could probably f***ing sing along and punch the f***ing air to it without any hint that he was missing the f***ing point! Suffice to say I would rather eat a whole f***ing packet of un-inflated balloons than be subjected again to this howling f***ing bilge, with Bellamy singing like a f***ing That’s Life dog doing an amusing f***ing canine version of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’!

Finally, the end is in sight but only before wading through one last fresh hell, as if through a steaming moat of blood-flecked turds; ‘The Globalist’, an extended f***ing fantasy about a bloke who destroys the world just because he needed to get a little love and never did. Searing f***ing analysis there! Just think, there’d have been no Holocaust if someone had only given Hitler a f***ing cuddle and no Khmer Rouge if one of those Cambodian girls had thought to give Pol Pot a peck on the cheek rather than be all two-faced and superficial! Bellamy, you truly are the mother and father, son and f***ing daughter of all c***s!

Christ in Heaven, this is a f***ing atrocity of a f***ing album. Absolute, grade A, priceless f***ing horsewank! They should set up a special court in the f***ing Hague for it, next to the f***ing War Crimes one! You can actually f***ing sense the band getting shitter as the album progresses – Bellamy went into the studio to record Drones a man, and came out a f***ing boy – the sort of f***ing tortured, desperately self-important adolescent boy who spends his evenings with his head stuck out of his f***ing suburban window screaming "I HAVE A PENIS, TOO!" at the moon and beating his bare f***ing pigeon chest! Drones – an album made by stupid, pathetic c***s for stupid pathetic c***s!

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