United States of EurAsia

I just listened to the new Muse release "United States of Eurasia." The concept- political. Interesting. New. The United States must conquer all the territory from the west coast of Europe to east coast of Korea in order to secure its access to natural resources.
The sound- imagine Queen harmonies over technical beats and paranoid violins. The resulting mix pulls together so many different sounds that even Girltalk would have nothing to add to it. The letdown- for a year, Matt Belamy has been talking about how he has been listening to middle eastern and Mediterranean music for the entire year leading up to this album, and this track is a pretty obvious reflection of that.
The problem? The lead line in the song that is supposed to showcase this new set of influences is the most clichéd representation of middle eastern music that has ever existed in western pop culture. If Bellamy had not actually adopted music from the middle east as an artist influenc and just watched the movie Lawrence of Arabia before he recorded this track, I would not be able to tell the difference. I almost had to laugh when I heard this string arrangement, since even without Bellamy's hyping up that he was going to mix Middle Eastern tunes into the new song, the result stands on its own as a dissapointing attempt to sound exotic. It would be like if Muse told their fans they had been "getting really heavy into Native American music" only to materialize in Bellamy yelling WOO WOO WOO WOO HEY O WATA over the track.

The highpoint of this song- the vocal harmonies. Now here is an influence that they really follow through on- Queen. Multilayered, all three singing several parts- this is the way to harmonize. Very similar to the vocals on the track Assassin on Black Holes and Revelations. My issue with Assassin was always that the vocals were drowned out by an overbearing guitar riff, but this track suffers from no such defect. The harmonies are front and center- they are by far the best part of the song. I can only hope more tracks on The Resistance take Muse's experimentation with Queen-esque melodies even further.

It's a good thing that this is not the single. Although this is the first song to debut off the new album, the first single will be a track called "Uprising." I have no idea what Uprising sounds like, but it has to be better. Just has to.