Imagine a pitch dark backdrop involving astral travel that suddenly gets erupted with the sounds of splinters of meteor showers coming to overpower you. Absolution is really the tool that makes you the lonely traveler through outer space. And you are being guided only through the voices of the messiah from the future, a.k.a., the voice of Matthew Bellamy and company. Lots of people have drawn parallel to this stage of Muse with Floyd of the ’70s. Imagine The Dark Side of the Moon or the strayed staccato like features of queer sounding pitches from Ummagumma and you definitely get the picture.

However here is a much more engineered and challenging sound, a rare combination of tremendous perfectionism with originality. Muse is astral projection of the future and the album completes the image to the very best! There is a great amount of Radioheadian sarcasm at play but the music is much bigger and overpowering. There is no space for any amount of typical Radioheadian crooning. Absolution as an album is a bigger journey into realizing that astral space of future doomsday gloom along with the loneliness that accompanies on greater concentration on the individual. This is a syndrome that everybody suffers and more so with the passage of time. Muse has handled this struggle of the self within a self within the huge frame of a space journey. The space here acts as both the travel to the future of mankind along with the journey of the individual on its self unearthing. There are streaks of the blatant outbursts of gloom, desolation as well as a striking awe for the grander play going on with the universe. This is what reel one of the operatic play is all about.

If you look at reel two of the album shows a more perplexed and a rather consigned individual who is not only cynical but rather skeptical of the whole play. There is constant and nagging question against the grander and awesome body of fate and ruler ship and the question of what is fair play. One can see that the marionettes that would have given in to the greater hollowness and apathy of Radiohead’s Kid A have replaced it to come to the tried and tested action packed fight back approach. And hence you come to reel three that comes to face the demonic with the blinding piano chords facing the trials of faith in “Apocalypse Please” as if echoing the quest for “apocalypse now” and there awaits the groping for truth and “it’s time we saw something biblical”. This calling forth of a miracle is a pledge to the universal forces thrown out through the distinct works of “Sing for Absolution” and “Time is Running Out”. There is the tempering showcase of the excess and the hysteric along with the panic attack that only calms for brief transitory period. The album is a reflection of our times of disillusion and crisis in the overall sense of the realm.