Album: Muse

If its predecessor, Absolution, was steeped in portents gloomy enough to gladden the heart of the most heavily mascara-ed Goth, Black Holes and Revelations takes Muse's trademark paranoid political outlook to a new pitch of melodramatic intensity. Though often compared to Queen, the trio are closer to the Seventies prog-rockers Rush: like them, Muse fuse grandiose pomp-rock and fanciful political beliefs with outlandish sci-fi overtones - but without quite reaching the solipsistic absurdity of the French art-rockers Magma, who devised a private language for their dubious social fables. At least, with Muse, you get to hear just how daft Matt Bellamy's opinions are, even though one might be broadly in agreement with him on some points.

Not that there are any original ideas left on music's conspiracy-theory revolutionary fringe. The notion that aliens have taken over the world's leaders - roughly the argument of the turgid stomp'n'synth track "Exo-Politics" - has been previously rehearsed in much more entertaining fashion by Fela Kuti on Beasts of No Nation; and the call to "Shoot your leaders down/ And join forces underground" (in "Assassin") is the kind of thing that left Primal Scream with egg on their faces after "Bomb the Pentagon". Still, it's nice to know where a band stand, even if it's on fairly thin ice.

But Black Holes and Revelations is a huge improvement on earlier Muse albums, particularly in the breadth and diversity of styles employed. One moment, it's all brushed drums, courtly guitar arpeggios in a Radiohead manner and Queenly three-part vocal counterpoints on "Soldier's Poem"; the next, it's skirling organ drones and military snare ("Invincible"), anthemic Coldplay piano chords ("Starlight"), power-crazed electric bouzouki-metal ("Assassin"), modulating "Baba O'Riley"-esque synth-rock ("Take a Bow"), or flamencoid orchestral folly with mariachi trumpet ("City of Delusion"); and even, in the concluding "Knights of Cydonia" (a quintessentially Rush-ish title if ever there was one), a sort of Morricone-rock in which spaghetti-western horns are spiked with Dick Dale-esque surf-guitar runs, as bizarre a formula as you're ever likely to encounter in mainstream rock.

Best of all is the single "Supermassive Black Hole", the monster funk-rock groove that is, by some distance, the best thing the band have created to date, with Bellamy crooning in falsetto like Prince, while Chris Wolstenholme's counterpoint warns of "Glaciers melting in the dead of night/ And the superstars sucked into the supermassive black hole". As if there weren't enough things to worry about.

DOWNLOAD THIS: 'Supermassive Black Hole', 'Knights of Cydonia', 'Take a Bow'