Beautiful Lie [LP]

It's easy to take potshots at actors turned musicians, since it often seems like the actors are taking advantage of their celebrity by turning into recording stars. This ignores two facts: first, often these actors have been playing music for as long as they've been acting; and second, who's to say that these critics, if put in the same position, wouldn't take advantage of their celebrity to pursue their dream projects? In the case of 30 Seconds to Mars, the metallic post-grunge quartet led by Jared Leto (after all these years, still best-known as Jordan Catalano on the alt rock-era TV series My So-Called Life, although he has been excellent in Darren Aronofsky's Requiem for a Dream and David Fincher's Fight Club and Panic Room, as well), these actor-turned-musician arguments don't really matter since, by any measure, the band is quite awful. A melange of U2 atmospherics, grunge angst, gothic brooding, and metal guitars, the band floats out of time, inspired heavily by '90s alt rock bu