by Chris Atchinson
Metro Toronto
April '04

It’s sometimes surprising the degree of success a band can have in one part of the world while going virtually unnoticed in another.
In the case of UK trio Muse, selling out arenas and other large venues across Europe and at home in England, has been a relatively easy task. In North America, even though the response to the band’s music has been positive, its record sales have been unimpressive.

But the band is looking to reverse that trend with its current North American tour, which brings it to Toronto today."I think it’s really because we haven’t been here much,"
Muse bassist Chris Wolstenholme explains of Muse’s limited success in Canada and the United States. "I think (American audiences) now understand much more what the band is all about."

Playing together as a band since 1994, childhood friends Matt Bellamy, Dominic Howard and Wolstenholme left the Devon countryside and earned a reputation for their energetic live performances with music that could best be described as grandiose rock, mixing orchestral arrangements with supercharged guitar riffs.

"On this album, it combines a lot of classical piano music with a lot of modern influences and modern sounds, as well," Wolstenholme says of their third offering, Absolution. "I think the start of the album is pretty dark talking about the end of the world, but there are songs on the album that are also extremely positive."

With the anti-Iraq war protests that filled London’s streets in 2003 as a backdrop for the Absolution recording sessions, the album took on a decidedly darker tone, focusing on topics such as death and the end of the world. But Wolstenholme insists the record is not all doom and gloom, even with song titles like Apocalypse Please.

While Wolstenholme explains that the response from North American fans for Absolution has been positive thus far, he remembers that the band’s label was less than supportive of the idea of releasing Stockholm Syndrome, the first single from Absolution, as a free download off their website.

"We felt that because the whole downloading thing is massive right now, we wanted to offer the first single for free and obviously the record company didn’t want to do that," Wolstenholme recalls. "As far as we’re concerned, we think downloading is more a problem for the record companies than for the bands. We’ve never really had a problem with it and I think it’s something that the record companies need to rethink, as well. If albums weren’t so expensive people wouldn’t want to download them in the first place."

Muse plays the Mod Club tonight.