Muse was born with a bad rap.

In all fairness, the British power trio’s 1999 debut, Showbiz, bore more than a few stylistic similarities to the shambolic, arena-ready moments of guitar-era Radiohead. But despite reasonable charges of copycatdom, the album was a strong collection of anxious rock songs, drawing influence not just from The Bends, but from black metal, baroque classical music and straight pop. Nowadays—situated next to the fallout of post-Y2K ‘head-rippers—the band’s early Yorkian similarities seem pretty innocent. Matthew Bellamy’s is an insistent bawl, one that borrows from TY’s cock-eyed, edge-of-cliff force, but gets by on its own character. The guitars on Showbiz and Origin of Symmetry squall and shout like a
meat heady Greenwood, but do way
too much rocking to pass for anything on the smarty pants OK Computer. In retrospect, the rip-off hullabaloo is kind of silly. Especially when there’re records by Keane and Coldplay (plus a host of other shit) to charge
with swindling. 

Muse have come a long way since those early days, de-emphasizing the way-too-big guitars, sandpapering edges down to reveal, above all else, a decent pop sensibility. With the release of 2006’s Black Holes & Revelations, the Devon, Englanders wax accessible, with their simplest, most direct song cycle yet. They even get down like a bunch of honkey Princes on “Supermassive Black Hole,” a song that forces Muse out of its three-dudes-plus-distortion comfort zone to interesting, divisive results (just take a stroll down Blog Ave. for the cavalcade of opinions). 

But a single problem remains: Bellamy’s lyrics are fucking garbage. And always have been. At least Yorke’s vagaries and nonsense sound educated. Bellamy is little more than a mindless ranter. Like in “Exo-Politics,” when he proffers some anti-potent stuff about alien invasions. Maybe it’s an easy road to the paranoia angle, but fear of the other has never sounded so silly.

That said, the record is truly a smart musical set, one that builds on the pop bent of 2003’s cocksure Absolution, an album that found Muse pressing their songs to arena’s ceiling with piss and vigor. Black Holes, for all its effort, isn’t exactly a departure. It still relies on the sweetness of weighty guitar riffs and arpeggiated synth, but what surrounds the swirls is a bit more vibrant on this record. From flamenco guitars to spaced-out weirdness, this is the sound of a band giving it—whatever “it” actually is—a shot. If Absolution was Muse at their big-rock peak, this is the start of a necessary journey in another direction. 

Hopefully somewhere far away from that nasty rap of theirs. 

August 3. Hammerstein Ballroom, 311 W. 34th St. (at 8th Ave.), 212-307-7171; 6:30, $32.