James Cameron must have produced this album for 30 Seconds to Mars because it sounds like the musical equivilent to Avatar. Every song sounds incomprehensibly huge! With all the child group choruses and tribal drumming going on, it even sounds similar to some of the music in Avatar. 30STM was shooting for the stars on this album because they just pulled out all the stops. Its like they decided, "Okay, this album is going to make us bigger than U2 and the Beatles combined". They just went all out and the result is a massive sounding album that is hard to critique because of the sheer size of it. Size in sound not in depth or time mind you. Most of the music is fairly simple, but it has been double or quadruple tracked to give it a full powerful sound. This style of production is quite effective. Its very moving sounding music. Lyrically, its somewhat mundane, life is war type imagery, not too creative of course. But you can't fault Leto and crew for doing something they really wanted to do. Their last album was on the top 200 charts for more than 2 years so naturally they needed to up the ante. Its a bold record and the sheer girth of its sound almost puts it in a class of its own. If the production quality was a little more rough around the edges, you'd be able to see all the faults the music has... it can be somewhat boring at times. But the way in which it was recorded more than makes up for its faults. 30STM has brought back "arena" rock, whether it was gone or not... it sounds as if the whole world was brought in to play little pieces on this album.. Check it out, but don't be shocked if in a month or two you really just couldn't care less about this album.
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