Review: 30 Seconds to Mars's This is War

Right off the bat, if you’re a fan of Muse then stop reading right now and just listen to this album.

This is War is the third album from the Californian 30 Seconds to Mars, and it is a dangerously potent mixture of styles. All throughout the sound is tinged with the spacey passion of Muse and the sickeningly sweet electronic digs of Daft Punk, executed with an orchestral zest for melodies and themes that don’t soar so much as they’re strapped to nuclear missiles and shot into the sun.

Every piece of music on this album is not like all the others, but what they have in common is that, save for the intro and outro tracks, there is an unrelenting intensity that fills every moment of sound, thanks in large part to Jared Leto’s preposterous vocal range and volume. Synthesized dredging bass, impressive, complex orchestration, and some furiously tight drumming come together very well to create an album that is track-for-track consistent. There is no faltering from the established feel so, if this album doesn’t appeal to you from the start, it probably won’t ever.

But if it does appeal to you (and it obviously did to me), then prepare for a relentless one hour flat of music. 30 Seconds to Mars has replicated the formulas for nearly every style of rock music in War. We have ground-shaking stadium anthems in This is War, Night of the Hunter, and the ‘popular rapper gets a verse’ song with Kanye West’s autotuned lines in Hurricane. Closer to the Edge is a techno-singed sprint of a song whose chorus carries the bellowing echoes of mid-2000’s Creed.

I think the reason this album is so appealing is its successful mixture of three very successful, but often exclusive styles of music: The extremely catchy melodies found on the lips of pop acts such as Lady Gaga, or Fall Out Boy; the cryptic, powerful and emotionally charged lyrics of the more traditional styles of heavy metal; and an instrumentation that is almost not rock and roll. These three elements are brought together with equal face time and love given to each, producing a pop-rock-metal-spacey-techno result.

This is War is an album I liked very much. It doesn’t feel like that these twelve songs are simply the best of the batch. There is a specific feel to the entire album, and it flows from measure to measure very well, very deliberately. It is very much a complete package that wants to take the listener on a journey, wants to show its complexities and depth and meticulous construction for all to see. But this album is first and foremost a product whose first purpose is to entertain and engage the audience, which it accomplishes with a great amount of polish. What’s better, it’s got enough pop in it to hook you on the first listen, so the second time through is less of a chore, and much more of a pleasure.