Critics may love to dump on Muse, fans may bitch and whine every time they experiment with their sound (meaning with every new release), and rock purists may suggest that they’re more of a hair metal band than genre-spanning alt-rockers… but Muse are one of the biggest rock bands in the world, and with every release I love them more. Just because Absolution is my favorite album by the band doesn’t mean I can’t love everything they do, even this… weird thing.
“Survival” was chosen as the theme song for the 2012 Summer Olympics in London, and it’s appropriately epic: the song begins with a tempting staccato piano, adding Matthew Bellamy’s world-spanning lyrics (“I’ll give my strength to the whole human race”) and slowly building to an enormous hard rock song. The weird part is the circular operatic vocals, both male and female, that seem at once completely out of place and an absolutely ingenious strategy for a global song of this magnitude.
On the Richter scale, “Survival” is at least an 8.0. You gotta hear this one. Listen below.
-Jordy Kasko
Stream: Muse – “Survival”
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