Citizen Erased - analiza

In this essay, I’d like to take a look at a song by Muse-one of my favorite bands of all time. “Citizen Erased” is a 7 minute long space rock epic featured on the band’s 2001 release Origin of Symmetry and showcases the album’s progressive and space rock influences while maintaining the dark sound of the earlier Showbiz. OOS centers mostly on describing how the band members have changed during touring and slowly increasing fame, but also utilizes dystopian themes that would define their later works. In an interview, Muse’s Matt Bellamy who wrote the piece, says that "It's an expression of what it feels like to be questioned. I spend more time than most people being asked about purpose, and it's a strange feeling. I don't really have the answers and I have to respond on the knowledge I have obtained so far, but the problem is that it gets printed, and something else has come along that's made you completely disagree with what you said". Despite not being released as a single, the song became a fan favorite and it’s still performed live quite often.

Now, let’s take a look at the song structure. Citizen Erased is written in the key of A minor (though you can also see it as C major, but we’ll talk about that later) and a tempo of 85 BPM. The song can be broken up into 8 sections: Intro, Verse 1, Chorus, Verse 2, a special quiet Chorus, Guitar Solo, Chorus and Outro. The only part of the song that really repeats is the chorus, and the intro riff. Instead, Matt takes you on a 7 minute long journey that keeps evolving.

The song starts with Matt Bellamy playing a simple yet powerful riff on a 7 string guitar with a very fuzzy tone that Muse is known for. The riff pedals on the tonic note A, and is basically a call-and-response between that low pedal and high, screetchy harmonics. The guitar is then joined by Dominic Howard playing a funky “James Brown inspired’ drum groove accentuating the rhythm of the riff. It’s actually this drum part that inspired the band to create what we now know as Citizen Erased. Next, Chris Wolstenholme layers the guitar part on a bass, also heavily distorted. At this point the harmonics are replaced with a simple walk down the scale from A to E. These three elements carry on as Matt begins delivering the verse. This song perfectly captures his iconic dramatic vocal style, with very audible breathing noises. Meanwhile the guitar starts playing a different repetitive pattern while the bass keeps the steady line clichè.

Now we move on to the chorus. Before the actual chorus however, there is a short instrumental interlude playing the chords F, C, E, Am, G, F, C, E. The chord progression is pretty ambiguous, without any strong resolution to the tonic chord Am, which is only played very briefly. This, coupled with a very rapid harmonic rhythm contrasts really well with the earlier sections' simple harmony. Those exact chords continue playing while Bellamy starts singing the chorus. This is honestly one of my favorite Muse vocal parts, it sounds so heavenly. Again it’s a call-and-response of sorts, between the lower belted notes and the high falsetto. The chord progression repeats 2 times after which the E chord finally resolves to an A minor in a perfect cadence, signaling the end of the chorus.

The final vocal phrase still rings out as we enter the second verse, which is almost a completely new song. The drums still play that same groove, albeit much lighter. The same descending line clichè from the intro riff now builds the harmony for this moody laid back section, with an organ sound providing the chords, a simple bass and a twangy clean guitar tone playing a solo over all of this. Matt starts singing again, just like the line clichè, the melody is very similar to the first verse, but delivered in a very different way. Then we get a stripped down version of the chorus, but this time everything is belted. However the backing vocals are sung in falsetto. Once again the final E chord brings us back to the A in a big crescendo that leads up to the familiar intro riff. Afterwards the first chorus instrumentation and harmony repeats and Matt Bellamy performs his second solo over it. This one is much more energetic and also very chaotic, almost sounding like it was written in one take. This is followed by a repeat of the first chorus which fades into the outro section.

Glitched out phasing noises, typical of this album, a string section and a piano build up a dark emotional ballad. It really feels like after all we’ve gone through the citizen has finally been erased for good. The new chord progression is much more functional, and is now pointing towards a C major chord, suggesting we now moved to the relative major key. Or maybe we’ve been in C major the whole time? It’s honestly hard to tell but personally I feel like only the outro really accentuates the C chord, as you might remember it's the A minor that's used to ground us before each section transitions up to this point and the iconic intro riff is clearly centered on A. It’s sort of ironic that the saddest part of the song is the only one clearly in the major, supposedly “happy” key. However Muse really brings out the saddest parts of the major key here with the iconic F-Fm-C cadence that’s used in so many classic ballads and it’s with this cadence and some more phasing noise that we end this song.

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