Bad news for all you My Chemical Romance fans out there: The band as you know it is no more. But they want you to know their “good friends.”
The Black Parade will be carrying on in their stead.
What the hell? Yes, good question. MCR’s new glitzy rock-opera about death doesn’t pretend to have the answers, but by the time you’re done listening to it, you won’t care.
Like MCR’s two previous albums, The Black Parade is a concept-themed record, with the chosen subject being the unfortunate early demise of one John Dear, known simply as the Patient. He kicks off in the very first song on the CD, “The End,” and MCR spends the rest of the album rocketing through this young man’s life, going over all his memories, regrets, hopes and dreams in search for meaning in the face of meaninglessness. And what’s more, they do a bang-up job.
The Black Parade, aside from being the band’s alter-ego, is also the name of the new album. The idea behind the album is when you die, death comes for you in the form of your strongest memory. And because the Patient was so young, for him, that memory is the day his father took him into the city as a child to see a marching band. The entire CD focuses around this idea and theme of facing down death. Though it sounds morbid, the CD is anything but.
Musically, the album is brilliant. Part of the reason MCR has chosen to represent themselves as their alter-egos for this CD is because it allows them to be more musically innovative than anything they’ve done on previous records, and the pay-off is astounding.
The title track, “Welcome to The Black Parade,” is a five-minute elegy that starts off slow and wide-eyed enough before blasting off into hard-edged guitar and Gerard Way’s trademark rock ‘n’ roll scream-song.
Tracks such as “Mama” and “Cancer” push the envelope far past MCR’s previous sound, with the former (featuring Liza Minelli) sounding like a drunken calliope staggering to its fiery doom; while the latter, featuring just Way and a piano, is startling in its aching vulnerability – not something MCR has previously been known for.
But fans who were drawn to MCR for their aggressive, adrenaline-pumped rock sound won’t be the least bit disappointed.
“Teenagers”is a fist-pumping, scream-it-out-the-car-window anthem; this album’s “I’m Not Okay (I Promise).” And if you’re put off by the unrepentant cheese of the last track’s chorus – “I am not afraid to keep on living, I am not afraid to walk this world alone” – then you probably stopped listening a long time ago, anyway. The rest of us will be grabbing our black T-shirts and queuing up to see the live show.
Inevitably, comparisons will be made to MCR’s mentors and old tour companions, Green Day, and with good reason. Aside from the obvious similarity of a concept rock opera, MCR also got the same producer, Rob Cavallo, that produced all of Green Day’s albums except for 1999’s “Warning:” and the same director, Sam Bayer, who did all of Green Day’s videos for 2004’s “American Idiot.” But the comparison should be taken as the highest praise.
MCR has taken a subject as old as humanity itself and flung themselves into the musical abyss with it, and emerged victorious with a truly remarkable album.
