Thirty Seconds to Mars are a considerably bigger proposition in France than their records alone might suggest. The arena is packed, the response deafening, and from the moment Jared Leto appears it is obvious that this is less a conventional rock concert than a mass gathering with Leto presiding over it.
And he is very good at that. The Hollywood star of Requiem For A Dreamand Blade Runner 2049attacks the role with messianic fervour, while his brother Shannon provides the rhythmic backbone and an assortment of largely anonymous musicians fills out the guitars and synths. The music itself sits somewhere between arena rock, emo, pop and EDM, with enormous choruses built specifically for thousands of voices. The audience needs little encouragement. Leto can make an arena feel strangely intimate one minute, then have the entire place chanting back at him the next.
The problem is how much of the sound appears to be coming from somewhere other than the people onstage. Backing tracks are everywhere, sometimes reinforcing the performance and sometimes seeming to replace it. Voices, instruments and electronic parts pile up until it becomes difficult to tell where the live band ends and the programming begins. For music designed around scale and spectacle, some augmentation is understandable. Here, though, it repeatedly crosses the line from augmentation into substitution.
The difference becomes particularly obvious when Leto performs alone. For a moment, stripped of the arena machinery, there is a directness that the rest of the show often lacks. Then the tapes creep back in and the spell weakens again.
None of this seems to matter to the people around the stage. They dance, sing and throw themselves completely into the performance, and the communion between Thirty Seconds to Mars and their audience is undeniable. By the closing “Closer to the Edge,” fans are up onstage dancing with the Leto brothers and the arena is euphoric.
That makes the concert difficult to dismiss. Thousands of people leave ecstatic, and that matters. But so does the nagging feeling that much of what produced that ecstasy was already there before anybody walked onstage.
Thirty Seconds to Mars create a convincing live spectacle. It is thelive part that is sometimes harder to believe.
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