Muse: The Resistance (2LP) [WARNER]

Why you'll love it

This 2LP set gives the album's 13-minute "Exogenesis" symphony a side all to itself. The Resistance won the Grammy for Best Rock Album, topped the charts in 19 countries and is Muse's biggest-selling record, at more than five million copies.

This edition

• 2LP set
• Pressed in the EU

About the album

Muse built their own studio in Como, Italy, and spent the better part of a year there making The Resistance. Freed from anyone else's clock, Matt Bellamy went as big as his imagination allowed, mixing stadium rock with full orchestral arrangements, electronic pulses and a dystopian storyline inspired by Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.

"Uprising" stomps along on a glam-rock beat, "Undisclosed Desires" is a sleek, R&B-tinged surprise, and "Resistance" is pure arena rock. "United States of Eurasia (+Collateral Damage)" swells into operatic grandeur before ending on Chopin's Nocturne in E-flat, and "I Belong to You" slips into Saint-Saëns' Samson and Delilah. The band produced it themselves, with Mark Stent mixing and Bellamy writing the orchestral parts for Edodea Ensemble. The closing "Exogenesis" moves from overture to cross-pollination to redemption in one long, gorgeous arc.

The Resistance Tour carried it to stadiums worldwide, and "Exogenesis" even turned up on its own for Record Store Day. Most of us struggle to finish a shopping list; Bellamy finished a symphony in three movements and filed it neatly on side four.

Also at Kops: more Muse on vinyl · browse Rock

Tracklist

Listen

On Warner Bros. / Helium 3, a reissue of the 2009 album.