“Back to basics” is how Muse drummer Dom Howard has described their seventh album. Of course, this being Muse, “basics” means a concept album about a soldier’s indoctrination into remote-controlled warfare, complete with samples of JFK speeches and artwork that King Crimson might have declared a bit much. Still, you can see what Howard means: this is the band’s most focused work in a decade, ditching the genre walkabout of 2012’s The 2nd Law for a more polished variant of their early, unkempt sound: the doomy chug of The Handler could have been on Origin of Symmetry, while Reapers begins with frantic finger-tapping and ends with a monumentally riffy breakdown. It’s the heaviest the band has sounded in some time, and exuberant enough for you to ignore Bellamy’s clunky lyrics. But Drones veers badly off target in its final third, most pointedly in overindulgent chamber suite The Globalist, which veers from Morricone to Metallica, and concludes, bewilderingly, with an adaptation of Elgar’s Nimrod.
