AMERICA- Thirty Seconds To Mars Review

Thirty Seconds To Mars has certainly been changing. They started off as a very heavy band, full of guitar riffs and muscle, and know they make songs that sometimes have almost no instruments in them, purely synths and loops and drums. They started off this album quite awhile ago, with the singles Walk On Water and Dangerous Night, which both became medium sized hits but didn't go a tremendous distance. Like always, this album is characterized by grandiose hard hitting tracks of a medium speed with all the trappings of 2010s arena rock, but this time without as much pure heavy guitar and more modern electronic drums and keyboards. It's interesting to see a classic 30 STM chorus break down to the frantic off kilter sampling of modern dance pop, and the stripping down of their sound works well sometimes. keyword sometimes- in some cases they just turn it back to their old style, putting so many tracks in your head hurts and you feel like the song's closing in on you, and sometimes it's pared down so much and used with such liberal vocal sampling editing and autotune it feels computer generated and cold (not to mention boring). Remedy is a weird interlude, the mainly acoustic track basically implied in modern alternative albums, and it is pretty interesting in its completely stripped down sound and drop from the rest of the album but it seems kind of off and not very good of a recording. Sometimes 30STM drowns in their grandiosity, even going for full on instrumentals and minutes longs seconds of songs clearly made straight on the computer. A note on features- A$AP Rocky turns a boring repetitive song into a bit of a catchy one, albeit overly autotuned and still low in content, Halsey makes Love Is Madness into the perfect angry pop hit it should've been if it was released as a single. Features aren't normal for 30STM, but do work. I feel like this album is definitely going in mostly the right direction, but thy still need to clean up their over the top, rough and heavy edges. They need to do what all alternative artists should do- write songs with a guitar, not stitch them together on ProTools.