The band’s previous album, the overblown ‘Black Holes and Revelations’ got excellent and undeserved reviews. Not that they look like the type of guys who would need encouragement, but critics tapping them on the shoulder aren’t exactly circumstances inducing doubts about the course they took.

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In the past year, information leaks about Muse’s fifth album were suggesting that things weren’t going to get better: frontman and songwriter Matt Bellamy ‘threatened’ to get symphonical on us, and titles like ‘Resistance’ and ‘The United States of Eurasia’ signalled that he hadn’t grown out of his obsession with cheap conspiracy theories yet.

Not only it didn’t get better, it got worse. The best material on the album – MK Ultra and Resistance - is maybe equivalent to the band’s b-sides of two-three years ago. These two pieces could have passed as good if flanked by songs of the caliber of ‘New Born’ or ‘Space Dementia’, but among all that pretentious noise and beaten guitar riffs they draw a bitter question: is this the best that Muse’09 is capable of?

As painful as it is, we must address the symphonic part now. Entitled ‘Exogenesis’, it has three parts. The first minute or so of the overture doesn’t sound that bad actually, and on the first listening it even made me hopeful, but then came the tiresome arpeggi and Bellamy’s inane vocal part. The second part repeats the scenario: a piano passage quite decent for a rock band, unfortunately followed by an unmemorable rock bit. The third part fairs slightly better, only because it’s less untasteful. Whoever praised Bellamy’s ‘wonderful’ orchestration probably never heard as much as a Harry Potter soundtrack, let alone a real symphony.

For those of you who liked the album, don’t worry, you’re in good company. People over at Allmusic think it’s ‘by and large a fantastic album’, and Timesonline shrug their shoulders saying that ‘the sublime and the ridiculous need not sleep in the same beds.’ I maintain that the best counter-argument to these compliments is Muse’s very own 2001 album ‘Origin of Symmetry’.

No, it wasn’t a masterpiece, but it was a very good work. Unfortunately, with time the band put forward fewer and fewer ideas to match up to their gushing sentiment, and being a Muse fan has turned out to resemble a business with diminishing returns.