Pitchfork

I suppose the existence of H.A.A.R.P. is proof enough that Muse hardly needs validation from highfalutin' music critics, what with our five-dollar words and readers who're just hoping they get some good Radiohead or Queen cracks out of this review. Live albums are usually just victory laps, contract obligations, or cash grabs (sometimes all three), but this could still be your make-or-break Muse record: Even if the words "Apocalypse Please" or "Map of the Problematique" mean nothing to you, odds are you've been told Muse are "pretty good live." And they're a different kind of "pretty good live" than you usually hear us talk about here, because Muse make superhero music, and if you're going to offer declarations like "Tonight we can truly say/ Together we're invincible," there are few settings more appropriately comic-book than the one for this CD/DVD set: a twice-over sold-out Wembley Stadium.

Muse recall some of the more arena-ready rock of the 70s, but charmingly fall short of such hyphenates as "cock-" or "prog-"; their body of work is completely bereft of even the faintest hint of lemon-squeezing, and while showy, their musicianship services their songs: solos are prominent but rarely indulgent, the sort of challenges that precocious teen guitarists want to emulate and probably can in their bedrooms (a big reason for Muse's success).

That said, skeptics will still find the audio disc of H.A.A.R.P. to be tough sledding. If you never cared much for the "change the world by taking it on" attitude of songs like "Time Is Running Out" or "Invincible", piping in some crowd noise isn't going to change your mind. H.A.A.R.P. leans heavily on a certain type of Muse song, and it's hard not to notice more than a few compositional similarities: singer/guitarist/piano man Matthew Bellamy never met a "Thunderstruck"-style pull-off riff that he couldn't use for an intro, the rhythm section's liveliest setting is a steady motorbike chug, and the melodies are often built atop vaguely Latin minor chord progressions that switch to a ripe major nearly the same way every time (a Muse hallmark since "Muscle Museum" and "Uno" from Showbiz). And though the Radiohead comparisons don't really hold water anymore, the Yorke ones do; Bellamy sounds impressive having his falsetto blast over grand canyons of stadium air, but he relies almost exclusively on those unmistakable melismatics-- "Micro Cuts" is one of those interminable howlers that makes you wish Jeff Buckley's Grace never existed.

Even so, there's no denying that a format this huge and an undertaking this ambitious is what Muse has been building towards over a decade worth of releases; H.A.A.R.P. makes their two previous live releases sound like practice runs. As Pitchfork's Sam Ubl conceded in a review of Black Holes and Revelations, "Take a Bow" is the "kind of song that could level an arena," and as the closer of H.A.A.R.P., this proves to be true. Moreso than most bands, Muse feel limited by the space of a studio or a compact disc. Freed from its original casting as BH&R's overwrought ender, "Knights of Cydonia" opens the disc after a recitation of Prokofiev's "Dance of the Knights" (yeah, I know), dropping the whinnying horse effects, toning down the brass, and instead devoting itself to a multi-part rumble that recalls "Achilles' Last Stand". The stairstep piano riff that spikes the gorgeous "Starlight" could pass for a "Speed of Sound" rip in your local trainer shop (and, come to think of it...), but when you can hear the space between Bellamy and 90,000+ singing along like it's the biggest Dashboard Confessional concert ever, it chariots across the sky.

Of course, the visual elements of Muse's live show means the CD can't compete with the dazzling, colorfully shot DVD, which comes included with the physical package at no extra cost. Much of the concert experience is rendered flat on audio, particularly since the band's sound is far more imposing than its personality. Bellamy offers mostly polite and totally sincere stage banter in response to the constant "I LOVE YOU!"'s, along the lines of "you're beautiful!," "are you having a good time," and if the band had a sense of humor, I'd imagine introducing "Supermassive Black Hole" with "this next song is for anyone who likes a little r&b" was a cheeky nod to Rattle & Hum.

It might be hard for those of us in the States to understand how Muse became the first rock act to sell out the new Wembley-- when they toured in the U.S. last year, they were the opener for My Chemical Romance. I'm not sure whether that says more about Muse's popularity or MCR's, but those are the kind of groups Muse needs to be taken in the context of, and when compared the likes of Gerard Way's band, Fall Out Boy, the Killers, or Panic at the Disco, grandiosity seems like more of a natural fit for Muse than any of their American counterparts who often sound like they're using bombast as a way of numbing critics into submission or escaping emo into another dead-end of ego gratification. While many of the latter outfits try explicitly to create a concrete fourth-wall-busting narrative, Muse are more effective for implying the give and take-- they may just be following in the path of the Cure, the Doors, Rush, Pink Floyd, or even Led Zeppelin (I mean, you've seen The Song Remains the Same, right?), bands with similarly geeky and insular tendencies. In their case, Muse are the kind of act that rarely serves as an endpoint but more often makes teens fall in love with rock hard enough to explore it further. And that's fucking important. I mean, we can't all start with Radiohead.