Echoes of Thirty Seconds to Mars

Even without particularly loving the repertoire, albeit very popular, of Thirty Seconds to Mars and despite the very hot evening, the idea of a rock trio was fitting these days, to reconnect with the sound that doesn’t need too many instruments, nor colossal shows, to excite and entertain. But, in a packed Arena Flegrea, Thirty Seconds to Mars certainly did not revive the epic of the 1960s ‘power trio’, quite the opposite: a revered frontman and Oscar winner like Jared Leto had the vocal task of holding the difficult comparison with his self from a few years ago; his brother Shannon bore the weight of an obsessive, secure, and pounding drumming; Stevie Aiello’s guitar seemingly shifted compositions (and arrangements) from pop to a rock front, but without ever really dirtying them; the rest was done by recorded sequences, from bass to keyboards, and so the rock and roll game is much less fun. Live but not too much, in short. But the band’s fans were fine with it, they even appreciated the tourist village entertainer appeal with which the star leader urged every two minutes to clap hands, keep the rhythm, sing along with him (an old trick that always works), he was joined on stage by a few dozen spectators… The riffs and choruses were certainly not lacking, but the rest often became excessively and unnecessarily pompous, rhetorical, causing a strange short circuit: it seemed like ‘adult-oriented rock’, but in the audience, the former kids of the early century experienced it as a generational nostalgia. The TSTM, however, have sold their fair share of millions of records, from the first album in 2002 to ‘It’s the end of the world but it’s a beautiful day’ in 2023. The show focused entirely on music, lights, smoke, and visuals ‘as needed’, the minimum guaranteed, and it wasn’t displeasing, for once at least, in a setlist that lined up hits like ‘Monolith’, ‘Rescue me’, ‘This is war’ (a title that didn’t prompt the vocalist to comment on the wartime we are living in and even scared a little when the audience loudly repeated a metaphorical ‘fight, fight, fight’), ‘A beautiful lie’, ‘City of angels’ in an acoustic interlude, and so on until the apotheosis of ‘Stuck’, irresistible in its chunky essence finally truly rockish, ‘The kill’, ‘Closer’.