30 Seconds To Mars - "A Beautiful Lie" CD Review
By  Brian Gearing
March 8, 2006
Glide Magazine

Thirty Seconds to Mars singer and former Teen Beat drool sponge Jared Leto can be forgiven if his inability to outlive all the My So Called Life references in his band’s reviews is what left the pieces of his shattered heart splattered all over the band’s second album; but if the mass-marketed teenage melodrama he insists on perpetuating well into his late twenties is real, he deserves all the misery he’s got. Alternative rock radio is dead, not just commercially, but artistically, and the formulaic punk-pop-emo slop on A Beautiful Lie is the reason the only people who tune in anymore are technophobic, teary-eyed teenage girls with nothing better to do on a Friday night.

After all, he is singing to them. The vaguely proggish keyboard riff that opens the album on “Attack” is one of the few glints of originality, but Leto’s inexplicably angry screams and formulaic no-good-for-you-girl dribble drag it down into the abyss of generic softer verse/harder chorus uniformity where “The Story” and “The Kill” wallow in the spilled blood of their own broken emo hearts. “Was It a Dream” tries to channel the Cure via post-grunge neo-balladry but only manages to lift the curtain on its own lack of imagination. The layered guitars and shivering high hat on “Savior” flash a spark to clear the band’s vision, but the revolution Leto swears is coming on “R-evolve” must be around the last corner waiting for 30 Seconds to pass.

The wait for an evolution from the album’s drab radio formula is longer than that. Hidden tracks, which should be punishable by forced listening to every one ever produced, are always a bad idea, but on an album as hard to get through as A Beautiful Lie, they’re downright paradoxical. The disc’s best track, the untitled number twelve, is preceded by fifteen minutes of silence, but at least it’s not fifteen more minutes of music. 30 Seconds to Mars combines the heartbreak and anguish of contemporary teen icons like Dashboard Confessional with all the sincerity of hair band power ballads, translating sunset strip fantasies to the 21st Century via self-doubt and impotence, and ending up blasting cock rock without the hard-on.