Nostradamus probably would have been our best hope, but not even he could pull out a fresh scroll, ink his quill and hazard a guess at this. Or at least if he did we couldn’t decipher the reams of cryptic twitterings in time, in which case we’ll apologise to the mystical beardy lunatic. But he must know that already. 7 years ago a band appeared with an album, ‘Showbiz’, a rigid and occasionally histrionic take on the discipline of angst rock, perfectly suited to turn-of-the-century tensions, but with no immediately apparent concept of a world beyond their visible horizon. Speed forward through time to the now and you’d be hard pushed to believe the same outfit, the same trio of pale middle-English boys, Radiohead and Smashing Pumpkins wannabes, could be responsible for the virtuoso exaggeration and sheer bloody-minded audaciousness of ‘Black Holes & Revelations’. It is a record befitting of every expectation they’ve nurtured since that first misleadingly compliant album, and they have been busy on that front.
It would be hard, and maybe wrong, to say it were an obviously better album than the expansive intergalactic bloom of ‘Absolution’, but that may be what we have to do. It certainly goes further, perhaps with less leg work too. It’s much more ridiculous though increasingly succinct, Matt Bellamy surely having reached that free-flowing head-point of musical alchemy through a combination of prodigious technique, intuition and possibly wizardry. It is really a planetary realm mid-way between the rooted explosive rock of ‘Origin Of Symmetry’ and the gaseous shifting cosmos of ‘Absolution’, an album of juxtapositions rather than single extremes.
If you ever think they’re getting complacent or over-familiar within a concept, chances are you’ll be blindsided by a rogue melodic asteroid or collapsing black hole fractions of a second later – it’s an album for all your senses, sharpened. The detail, pace and production of the entire record are enough alone to make it notable. Yet it is more than just notable. It’s preposterous – the scope of the songwriting, the rampant soldering of influences, its irresistibility in spite of all this, the fact that the intro to ‘Assassin’ sounds exactly like the Knight rider theme tune, yet it doesn’t matter.
‘Soldier’s Poem’, a reoccurring issue on the album, signalling an avoidance of pure fantasy as a subject matter and progressing political influences that appeared on ‘Absolution’, begins like a campfire ‘No Surprises’, only then belying that comparison by budding with formal multi-part harmonies cryogenically frozen since the 1940s. The magnificent ‘City Of Delusion’ is a slightly diluted Mars Volta, a too fast for the naked eye collision of mariachi rhythms, magnificent string crescendos, overdriven guitar and a Thom Yorke doing battle with Greek gods vocal, that goes down in one. ‘Supermassive Black Hole’ is of course their best single since ‘New Born’, like Prince seducing Trent Reznor, only twice as throbbing. And the closing and much talked about ‘Knights Of Cydonia’ is very much their own ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. There is no ambiguity, not once. Ambiguity might suggest that something isn’t possible. And that, as a concept, after listening to this record, just seems obscene. Revealing, indeed.