The world is in decline. No one in power can be trusted. Love is all you need. Or a nifty light show and operatic rock music might do you some good, too.
That, in a nutshell, was the takeaway from Muse's ever-hi-fi performance Sunday night at Target Center. The arty but heavy British trio brought along the similarly metallic but tender Evanescence for a dramatic twofer — the rare hard-rock show where the audience of 10,000-plus featured almost as many women as men.
With its glitzy, elaborate visual and pyro production, Muse once again lived up to its reputation as a live band that's as close to a Cirque du Soleil show as it is to its musical touchstones such as Rush and Radiohead. Woe to the cleanup crew that had to deal with all the confetti and streamers Muse blew off in the arena.
The headliners mustered up musical fireworks here and there, too, but not with the consistency of their visual gadgetry.
Sunday's set list pulled heavily from Muse's new album, "Will of the People" — yep, another one laced with rise-up dystopian themes. The band started in right away with those, using the album's title track to kick off its nearly two-hour set.
"We need a revolution / So long as we stay free," frontman Matt Bellamy bellowed in the opener.
After many previous tours that followed a similar format, Sunday's set did not seem very revolutionary as far as Muse concerts go. It also felt weighed down in the middle with limper, more melodramatic midtempo songs such as "Thought Contagion" and "Verona." The latter new one off like some of Coldplay's syrupiest gushers.
Meanwhile, the ambient piano-drum montage "The 2nd Law: Isolated System" at midshow also felt like an overthought, lame excuse for the otherwise compelling drummer Dominic Howard to step out onto the long proscenium stage near the center of the arena.
As the band turned back to some of its most angsty and feisty songs near show's end, including "Uprising" and "Prelude," the music got back on track, and the crowd got back on its feet to rock along, which probably wasn't very safe at that point with all the slippery confetti on the ground.
A large number of fans got there early enough for Evanescence, which rewarded them near the start of its hourlong set with the hard-hitting 2006 hit "Call Me When You're Sober." The Arkansas-reared band then did a musical 180 as a grand piano rose up from under the stage, and its Tori-Amos-gone-Ronnie-James-Dio-like singer Amy Lee dramatically plunked out the group's power ballad "Lithium."
Like another band with a "Lithium" track, Nirvana, Lee's crew has fine-tuned the loud-quiet-loud formula over the years but maintained its metal underside. Recent songs such as "Wasted on You" and "Use My Voice" were some of the most potent examples — but so was the band's breakout hit from 20 years ago, "Bring Me to Life," a spectacular finale even without any of Muse's visual spectacle.
