MUSIC: Muse mauls Mandalay Bay

They may as well be Vegas’ new house band, their shows an all-you-can-eat buffet of ostentation, their tunes loud love letters to extravagance of all stripes.

The dudes in Muse play like kids let loose in a candy store, indulging all impulses, grabbing everything by the fist full.

Granted, the band just stopped here last December at The Joint, turning in a much more abbreviated, bare bones performance that was part of 107.9 FM’s “Holiday Havoc” series, but that was little more than a warm-up routine for the band’s show at the Mandalay Bay Events Center on Saturday.

Besides, you can never get too much of a good thing, right?

And that’s pretty much Muse’s defining operating principle.

Bringing with them a retina-blasting, mega-watt stage show that they didn’t have at The Joint, the band performed atop towering risers covered in LED screens, amid a sea of green laser lights, and watched on as inflatable eyeballs rained down from the rafters at the end of a heated “Plug In Baby.”

Muse frontman Matthew Bellamy reprised his role as ascending guitar god, swinging his instrument in the air like a scythe, jamming on the riffs to Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love” and AC/DC’s “Back In Black,” unleashing huge squalls of sound with occasional detours into Yngwie Malmsteen style fretboard acrobatics.

Bellamy sings in keening, vaguely effeminate falsetto, but his guitar playing is all masculine, chest pounding showmanship.

Clad in a shiny silver suit, Bellamy seemed to revel in the spectacle that his band creates, punching the air and clapping his hands over his head maniacally before Muse had even launched into their second song, recent hit single “Resistance.”

Throughout the show, the band engaged in a game of one-upmanship with themselves, with the crowd growing increasingly overheated from one song to the next as the band roared through a litany of fan favorites, from “Supermassive Black Hole” to “Hysteria” to “Starlight.”

Those tunes were delivered with the kind of force meant to register on the Richter scale, pointedly overwrought, deliberately too much. How fitting was it then, that it all went down next door to a giant pyramid?