Muse Prove They've Finally Broken North America

There were resounding hoots, hollers and screams throughout Union Station last night after the crowd left Muse's show at Toronto's Air Canada Centre.

It was as if it was a slightly smaller reprisal of the hooting and hollering that took over Yonge Street late last month when the Canadian men's Olympic hockey team won gold, and it was with good reason. Muse, after 10 years of being denied, are finally — and quite deservedly — huge in North America.

Of course, a band that are massive everywhere else in the world could only have brought such a blinding (literally), massive and over-the-top stage set up with them. Muse spent time opening for U2 last year, whose own stage design for their U2 360 Tour was ridiculous enough, but I think it's safe to say the light show, campiness and total insanity of the Teignmouth, England trio's set-up on Monday (March 8) night left U2's stage design in the dust.

It began with three massive pillars, lit up to resemble skyscrapers and covered by a screen, which eventually fell away to reveal singer/guitarist/keyboardist Matthew Bellamy, bassist Chris Wolstenholme and drummer Dom Howard. It's difficult to describe exactly how mind-bending this design was: it basically involved the three musicians performing on top of gigantic rectangular prisms underneath similarly massive prisms which featured huge projections of their faces and other images.

At the end of "Resistance" it became clear these pillars were retractable platforms which lowered, letting all three members come down to a circular stage.

If you're a longtime Muse fan, the contrast between this show and seeing the band slugging it out in much, much, much smaller Canadian clubs during their Absolution days must have been jarring. Sure, they'd graduated to playing somewhat larger venues like Mississauga, Ont.'s Arrow Hall last time they were here, but there was absolutely nothing of this magnitude, brightness, sheer intensity and scale last time they came across the pond on a headlining tour.

Just when you thought things couldn't get any more ridiculous, they did. The most insane laser show I've ever seen probably induced a few seizures (indeed, there were warnings posted for epileptics outside the arena prior to the show) during "New Born."

In "United States Of Eurasia" and "Feeling Good," Bellamy wheeled out a glow-in-the-dark grand piano with lights on the inside and a keyboard that turned all sorts of different colours every time he hit a different note.

Right after those numbers, he emerged from the darkness at the side of the stage wearing some kind of half-keyboard, half-guitar contraption for "Undisclosed Desires." It wasn't a keytar, since it featured a guitar neck and headstock and appeared to simply be a keyboard and guitar cobbled together.

Gigantic eyeballs were also dropped from the press box.

It would be easy for a really, really popular band to bring props, lasers, flashing lights and a fancy stage in an effort to detract from a performance that wasn't  any good. But that definitely wasn'tt the case with Muse.

Throughout the show, they proved they've done nothing but master the art of live performance, repeatedly demonstrating their virtuousity. Bellamy twirled across the stage on numerous occasions, guitar held aloft over his head while soloing. Yes, North Americans, Europe long ago realized this little man is a huge effing rock star.

Wolstenholme and Howard launched into several proggy jams of their own throughout the set. The one drawback was that Bellamy — as he had done on previous tours — didn't perform keyboard and guitar parts during the same song, as he had done during the Absolution tours with renditions "New Born" and "Butterflies And Hurricanes." But this is really a small note, and isn't even a complaint.

For a band who only recently became large enough to sell out large arenas in North America — somewhat thanks to the Twilight phenomenon, sadly — the full stadium singalongs during older numbers like "Plug In Baby" and "Hysteria" were astonishing. So was the jumping in the pit during "Stockholm Syndrome."

On Monday night, Muse continually proved they're performers at the top of their game, that they've mastered their craft and, thankfully, North America finally gets them at last.

Check out CHARTattack's photos from this show here.



Here's what Muse played:

"Uprising"
"Resistance"
"New Born"
"Map Of The Problematique"
"Supermassive Black Hole"
"Guiding Light"
"Interlude"
"Hysteria"
"Niche"
"United States Of Eurasia"
"Feeling Good"
"Helsinki Jam"
"Undisclosed Desires"
"Starlight"
"Plug In Baby"
Snippet of Rush's "YYZ"
"Time Is Running Out"
"Unnatural Selection"

Encore:
"Exogenesis: Symphony: Part One (Overture)"
"Stockholm Syndrome"
"Knights Of Cydonia"