30 Seconds To Mars – This Is War

January 12th, 2010 by RBR

This is War
30 Seconds To Mars
Virgin/EMI

Coming four years after their massive ‘A Beautiful Lie’, this album has had an enormous amount of time and energy spent on it. The band has used a fair bit of outside influences on this album. These include, a screaming hawk, 100,000 30 Seconds fans that were recorded all over the globe, as well as Tibetan monks chanting on the opening and closing tracks. From the opening track, Escape, you begin to appreciate the amount of production that has gone into this release.
The album, although taking a little bit of a new direction for the band, does not drift too far from what loyal 30 Seconds to Mars fans will recognise as their sound. From the powerful first single Kings and Queens, to Jared’s haunting lyrics on Alibi, this is still 100% 30 Seconds. The band went through a great deal of turmoil during the making of the record and it comes through in the passion given to some of the performances and in the writing of some of the songs. Track, This Is War, possibly pointing to their massive legal battle with Virgin Records.
The review copy had Kanye West joining in on Hurricane, but which didn’t make it onto the release version. Personally it didn’t work for me, but as with some of West’s other work, it may have been a grower.
Taking the album as a whole, it could almost be constructed as a set list for a stadium concert. Being led in slowly, and building up to, This Is War. Giving the band a breather with the acoustic sounds on 100 Suns, building back up to the crowd led Vox Populi and taking you back down, as the light fades, to the sound of the Tibetan monks again on the unusually named L490. Coming from LA the band still seems able to avoid the commercial ‘pop rock’ which is prevalent on the West coast and still appeal to the masses.
This Is War is sure to please existing fans and probably win over a few more with its big ‘arena sound’ and is sure to go down a storm when the band tour UK arenas with it in February this year.
Wullie Marr