Thirty Seconds to Mars — AMERICA ANALYSIS & REVIEW
Published 04/20/2018
Is this serious? I could easily hear it as being a complete parody on everything that’s terrible about modern rock n’ roll. It comes off as rather comical, since it seems the band was trying to be a very obvious amount of annoying and cheesy. On top of that, what makes it even more hilarious is the fact that these were actually thoughtfully constructed songs with understandable roles for each musical element, further mimicking the tropes of the day and adding an ironic layer above the complete mess of awful musical ideas. Sadly, though, this wasn’t meant to be a joke, making it rather pathetic. How can a musician be so mindful about actually attempting to produce something of interest while being so mindless about their actual ideas? Enter these guys, who have made one of most disgusting albums of the year.
Let’s take them to school for a bit here, starting with the timbre. The synthesizer noises that dominated the first half of the album were nothing but nails on a chalkboard. It was a terrible decision to give such annoying, piercing, and ugly synthetic noise the keys to drive the song’s dynamic builds and attempted emotional foundation. The first four songs, as well as “Hail to the Victor”, were just wrong on every level with what was chosen for the sound, how the sound developed, and what emotions it tried to convey. It obviously went for being bold and beautiful, but with a terribly screeching sound quality and all too obvious marketing-driven decisions, or lack thereof, in structure and attempted flair, it completely failed and made me rather sick.
Some of the second half had a little more tolerable sound thanks to the absence of those synthetic layers, like in “Remedy”, but then the music just seemed completely lost and bland without any of the acoustic instruments like guitar or piano pulling any sort of weight or giving any personality to the structure. I felt no important rhyme or reason in what was done timbrally here. When the sound was softer and thinner, the song was simply able to get through easier, since this band completely whiffed at adding effective sonic layers.
It begs the questions of what they were trying to do and why they thought this was an appropriate result. How do you rationalize attempting an enthralling, emotional, spacious powerhouse by using these ugly, piercing synth tones and total lack on humanistic input on the other played instruments? Not that it matters, but little kids could have done this, given they have a professional mixing and mastering in the studio.
I also noticed a sheer lack of understanding about harmonic progression. Something that easily gives away how little talent or skill a musician has is how much they use harmonies that sound congenial and familiar but don’t have any sense of moving towards or away from anything. A main reason why the I V vi IV progression is so popular is that it does have both of these things, congeniality and progression, at a most basic level. It’s the progression that requires the least amount of effort to feel a sense of important motion.
This music shied away from that run down pattern, but in turn offered no sense of direction, purpose, or accomplishment in what was chosen. In the song “Dawn Will Rise”, perhaps the worst song I’ve heard all year, you can’t just rock back and forth between i and bVI with no rhythmic or timbrally inspired delivery and call it a day. That was awful. Sometimes they got a bit lucky, such as in the song “Live Like a Dream”, with chordal patterns they were still obviously chosen for their sheer connectability over where they went directionally, but ultimately had a little more rhythmic value and pedal tones that actually had some purpose.
Most everything was just a complete crash and burn, with every attempt at emotional depth being laughable, but surprisingly a couple of melodies were actually okay. The songs “Walk On Water”, “Great Wide Open” and “Live Like a Dream” actually had some compelling moments in their broad melodic shape and did well to expose the most interesting linear aspects. While the rest were easily too dull and hapless to make anything of themselves, which predictably followed the theme of underwhelming emotion, this at least showed a tablespoon of worthwhile musicality. Unfortunately, it was their lone bright spot, and one they couldn’t expound upon.
Perhaps the scariest thing about this, though, is that this album could have actually been worse, and there’s plenty of worse stuff out there. I do hope these guys call it quits after this one, but with all that went wrong here, it pains me to say that there’s other music along this similar line that deserves to be thrown away more than this one. Yikes.
