Muse
Live at the Air Canada Centre – January 16, 2016
It’s fitting that the last full show review we did was for Garbage which we praised “A Garbage concert is audio and visual perfection.” Full Review Saturday night found us witnessing both of these things on another level.
To put it simply; Muse are an extraordinary band They have the showmanship and musical talent of Queen mixed with the otherworldly sense and anti establishment ethos of Pink Floyd. Aside from solo tours we don’t have Pink Floyd anymore and 50% of Queen occasionally stages greatest hits shows. Muse are those bands for this generation. And Muse are staging shows that that very few acts are willing or able to do nowadays.
Speaking of staging…the real star of the show is the stage (videos / media designed by Thomas Kirk / Banoffeesky). Filling the spacious Air Canada Centre, the Muse stage looks like 3 ring circus with the centre being the main ring where the band resided most of the time (Drummer Dominic Howard and Morgan Nicholls [keyboards, backing guitar and percussion] were always here) and the other 2 rings reaching far towards the crowd giving Matthew Bellamy and Christopher Wolstenholme (bass) plenty of places to perform. Muse have incorporated live drones, projecting mapping on unfurling material and a gorgeous lighting rig for an out of this world concert experience. With the stage in the centre of the arena, this live in the round set up gives everyone the best seat in the house. In fact I’d argue that the people that are seated the furthest away are treated to some of the best views. Having seen Muse a few times and being blown away but their stage setups and production, The Drones stage production is the best I’ve seen from them.
But let’s not forget about the best part about Muse; their music. I was introduced to them when a bandmate handed me a burned disc with “muse” scrawled on the front. From then on my favourite song has been “Hysteria” and they launched into it only 3 songs in to which they tagged on part of “Back in Black” and “YYZ” by local heroes Rush. The 4th song was a surprise, “Citizen Erased” from (Origin of Symmetry) which Bellamy claimed “maybe 10 people in the audience would know”. Touring in support of their new album Drones they played a number of tracks from it – leading off the show with Psycho and Dead Inside and later dropping in more tracks including “Mercy” & “Reapers”. Other standouts were crowd favourites “Resistance”, “Supermassive Black Hole”, “Madness”, “Starlight” and a great closer to the evening “Knights of Cydonia”.
Muse is a band that I think is a successful not from video or radio play but, like the friend with the burned CD, word of mouth. Given that they’re played heavily on really only 1 Toronto station they easily sold out a huge venue and likely could have done it for a two nights. They’re is the kind of band that you see once and commit to seeing them any chance you can after that; bringing the uninitiated along with you.
Music in the 6 rates Muse at the Air Canada Centre a solid 6 out of 6ix.
