Muse deliver electrifying performance at Target Center
by Sofia Haan
February 27, 2023
The excitement was palpable at Target Center on Sunday night. Fans sporting Muse merch crisscrossed the crowded main lobby, anxiously awaiting their turn to stake out a spot in general admission. They had a right to be excited: Not only has U.K. rock band Muse established themselves as the must-see act for any rock fan, but the show marked the first time the band has visited the Twin Cities since 2013’s The 2nd Law tour. Throughout a nearly two-hour set, the band proved their showman chops, delivering a visually extravagant yet thematically vague return performance on their tour supporting 2022’s Will of the People.
Before Muse began, Japanese rockers ONE OK ROCK kicked off the night so loudly that they could be heard from the security gates. Hands in the shape of rock ‘n’ roll signs waved in time over the crowd as lead singer Takahiro Moriuchi’s voice soared over up-tempo songs brimming with thudding bass lines and energetic drumming. Transitioning seamlessly between singing in English and Japanese, Moriuchi pranced around the stage with the infectious swagger of an up-and-coming rock star, even going so far as to venture out into the walkway toward the B stage. At the end of their brief 30-minute set, the band expressed disbelief and genuine gratitude to the early arrivals in the audience. “This feels like a dream,” Moriuchi told the cheering crowd. “We’ve always looked up to these bands, and we can’t believe they're here.”
The crowd eagerly welcomed second opener Evanescence back to the stage with open arms, despite the band’s most recent visit to the Twin Cities being just this past fall. Screams rang out throughout, as lead singer Amy Lee gracefully marched to center stage, draped in a dramatic one-shoulder sparkling silver cape. “We’ve got a lot of music to play in a short amount of time,” Lee told her enraptured audience. “Let’s make the most of it.” Paired with Lee’s surging vocals, the band’s distorted metal guitar riffs and pulsing gothic bass melodies felt all-encompassing and magnetic. Lee was often brought to her knees as she sang, lunging toward the stage in a full-body release of the pain, grief, and love embedded in the band’s lyrics. Evanescence’s hour-long set wrapped with Lee thanking the audience for 20 years of their debut Fallen before launching into the blistering chords of “Bring Me to Life.”
While ONE OK ROCK and Evanescence’s performances were fairly to the point for the average concertgoer, Muse’s was unexpected, expansive, and daring. It felt like both a retrospective on the band’s nearly 25 years in the music industry as well as an artistic interpretation of what lead singer Matt Bellamy forecasts for the next 25 years.
The music and performance seemed to both draw on the previous eras of Muse and create a new chapter for the band. Born out of the desire to avoid releasing a greatest hits album and to create a benchmark album to represent all avenues of the band, Will of the People showcases Bellamy’s imagined dystopian world of the not-so-distant future. Drawing on themes of surveillance, unnecessary interventions by “The Man,” and general paranoia expressed in the more recent Muse albums, the album attempts to tell the story of a man fed up with the oppressive world in which he’s trapped, and his quest to overthrow the crush of the powers that be.
The result of this creative vision? Alternating between video packages guiding the viewer through the destruction of the dystopia and the band’s on-stage performance, Muse toyed with the very format of a traditional concert. They seemed to view each new song as an opportunity to best the show they had presented thus far. The band seemed to summon all available tools in their arsenal to complete this mission: Confetti coated the audience not once, but twice in the first 30 minutes; pyrotechnics shot out from numerous points on the stage for at least five songs; band members donned full-face geometric masks and LED jackets; and blinding strobes reflected colorful light off of mirrored panels rotating above the stage. Muse ensnared their audience’s attention and dared them to look away.
However, with as much emphasis as Muse placed on the visual elements of the show, the storytelling faltered as the performance wore on. While the band started strong with videos that correlated with the depictions of the fall of dystopian overlords, the narrative became muddy in the hopes of creating more impressive visuals, such as an animatronic overlord seemingly consuming the stage by the final song. The unabashed cry for revolution seemed somewhat vague, a call for a change with no real name nor solutions to achieve it. Perhaps more dedicated fans better understood the call.
Still, the sonic quality of the performance didn’t waver. Bellamy prowled the entirety of the stage, pausing at times on the B-stage walkway to furiously shred on his low-slung guitar. Back on the main stage, Chris Wolstenholme accompanied with smashing bass riffs and tight harmonies strained through a voice modulator. Throughout the set, the band roamed through their discography, offering a slate of both fan favorites and deep cuts from both their own and Bellamy’s solo work.
Bellamy’s vision for Will of the People seemed to be fully formed with the punchy synth-pop performance of “Compliance” toward the beginning of the show. As lights flickered across the audience, Bellamy created a foil to his oppressed character. Armed with only the mic, he leaped up and down the walkway, seemingly surveying his kingdom in the role of the oppressor as he sang “We just need your compliance/…and no more defiance/…no more self-reliance.” Underscored by a growling guitar, Bellamy’s voice rang powerfully throughout the arena as a massive animatronic masked revolutionary slowly shook his head on the mainstage. His message was clear: as exciting and charismatic as the oppressor may seem, a revolutionary is within all of us.
Fans ate it up. A diverse crowd that spanned multiple generations shouted back lyrics and danced furiously, transfixed by the power of the performance before them. As the house light went up and the crowd waited on the stairs to be released into the chilly evening, a crowd member summed up the entire night simply, saying “That was one for the books.”
Setlist
Will of the People
Interlude
Hysteria
Psycho
Map of the Problematique
Won’t Stand Down
Compliance
Thought Contagion
Verona
Time is Running Out
The 2nd Law: Isolated System
Resistance
You Make Me Feel Like It’s Halloween
Madness
We Are F–king F–ed
The Dark Side
Supermassive Black hole
Plug In Baby
Behold, the Glove
Uprising
Prelude
Starlight
Encore
Kill or Be Killed
Knights of Cydonia