Muse
July 21, 2006
Soma, San Diego, CA

I've been looking forward to seeing Muse ever since they played Coachella a few years ago. They had two shows in the area, LA's Greek Theatre which is a nice assigned seated outdoor amphitheatre, or San Diego's Soma, a hot dank sweaty general admission venue. Since I've never been to Soma, I opted for the SD show. And as a rule of thumb, general admission is always better then assigned seating, IMO.

Soma is just how I described. It's HOT, fucking HOT. I figured that we could just hang out on the back edges of the crowd and be alright, but it wasn't helping. Luckily once Muse took the stage at 9:15pm, it helped keep my mind off the heat. They opened with the first song on their new album ("Black Holes and Revelations"), "Take A Bow". The stage was pretty straight forward with a couple of huge screens behind them with projections and there was also an added keyboardist. At Coachella a few years back there was only the three of them.

They pretty much blazed through most of the new album and "Absolution" which is perfectly fine for me since the new record is good and "Absolution" was fantastic. Some of the standouts for me were "Invincible" for the great build up, "Starlight" sounds like a great 80s song, "Apocalypse Please" is a great dramatic song, "Time is Running Out" and "Stockholm Syndrome" brings back the memories of how great they were at Coachella, I always love the piano interlude during "Butterflies & Hurricanes", and they closed with "Knitghts of Cydonia".

Walking out in my sweat drenched shirt I realized that Soma is a pretty fun club but if I had the choice I'd probably go with the Greek next time. This might be more of a review of the venues since I knew Muse were going to be great and they didn't disappoint.