30 Seconds to Mars:  A Beautiful Lie
September  2005
By: Ray Pine
Album Score: 8 out of 10
Transcending the Mundane

I won’t suffer Be Broken Get tired Or wasted Surrender To nothing… The opening words to the newest album from Jared Leto and company. The follow-up to 2002’s S/T debut is a lot more than a stanza of poetry, but the line sums up the albums meaning pretty well.

This is an unrelenting album that not only showcases the bands musicianship, which is top notch for a rock band of this caliber, but also their penchant for writing huge choruses with great hooks. Forget about solo’s and thirty minute epics, this album is about tight song writing— songs with punch that say what they mean and get out before they’re welcome is worn out.

This is a departure in sound for this band that could, formerly, credit most of their influence to bands like Nine Inch Nails, Stabbing Westward and KMFDM. It sounds like Leto has been listening to a lot of NIN still but has also mixed in some My Chemical Romance and The Used as the sound is more abrasive on this album. While Jared Leto is still on vocals, his voice is less produced and more natural, with cracks and screams all over the place that give him a new sound and life.

Giving nods to contemporary rock acts like The Used doesn’t mean they’ve ripped that sound off but it does means that if you liked the first album, there is no guarantee that you’ll like this album. The lyrics are more personal, giving the album much more warmth then the industrially laced S/T disc. Leto emotes much better on this disc and finally shows the ability to capture an audience not only with his previous acting career, but finally, with vocal lines that bring an audience closer instead of pushing them away.

The album loses none of the aforementioned punch throughout, though the first three tracks on the album are probably the best; i.e.: Attack, Beautiful Lie, The Kill.

30 Seconds bills themselves as a progressive rock act, but I wouldn’t go so far as to call them that. They’ve got the rock part down… but why bother going down the progressive road when you can write an album like this?

For fans of: Nine Inch Nails, The Used, U2 (yeah, they really have all those sounds)