On 'Black Parade,' death becomes them
Like Green Day before them, the boys in My Chemical Romance have morphed from pop-punk upstarts to ambitious auteurs in the space of one album.
Two years after Green Day delivered "American Idiot," the group's masterful post-9/11 rock opera, My Chemical Romance releases "The Black Parade," a grand concept album inspired in feeling by the psychological fallout of the 2001 terrorist attacks. But whereas the songs on "American Idiot" were unified by a politically charged narrative, "The Black Parade," in stores today , coalesces somewhat more fancifully and quite theatrically around the band's already well-documented obsession with death.
My Chemical Romance worked long and hard to lay the foundation for this project -- launching a Web-based campaign explaining the story of "the Patient," a young man who's dying of cancer, reflecting on his troubled past, and cataloging his missteps. In interviews the band members have been naming illustrious reference points such as Queen's "A Night at the Opera" and Pink Floyd's "The Wall." (They've neglected to mention that they hired "American Idiot" producer Rob Cavallo .)
Clearly the big idea is to establish themselves as a big-idea group with the sort of integrity and ambition that last year's catchy hit single "I'm Not OK (I Promise)" didn't even hint at.
Mission accomplished, more or less. MCR pretty brilliantly mashes classic rock's bloat with punk's lean, surging energy, which is no easy task. Theatrical bombast and raw economy make strange bedfellows, but that's exactly the sort of paradox that makes "The Black Parade" so engaging. The album begins with a perverse welcoming waltz called "The End" and moves directly to the noisy ditty "Dead!" and "This Is How I Disappear," a gallop to the cosmic finish line that, along with a few other tracks, sticks closer to standard-issue emo than it should. In fact , it's a great surge of a song. But why bother with the retreads when you're capable of cracking the mold with pieces like "Welcome to the Black Parade," an elegant, measured march that shifts into raucous double time and becomes a gleeful joyride to the abyss? Or the Clash-Cab Calloway collision "House of Wolves" ?
Happily, perhaps ironically, there's more to celebrate than mourn on this musical death march. "A Clockwork Orange" meets T. Rex in the stiff, vintage riffs of "Teenagers," a deliciously twisted explication of adolescence, and the grotesque is given loving, piano-ballad treatment on "Cancer," where frontman Gerard Way nestles contentedly into lines like "I'm soggy from the chemo." Just when it dawns on you that ominous, frantically feel-good "Mama" is the rock generation's answer to "Cabaret," Liza Minnelli starts to sing. It's an incredibly weird and impossibly perfect moment ; the first time we sense the seed of hope that blossoms on the final track.
"I'm not afraid to keep on living/I'm not afraid to walk this world alone," bellows the Patient in "Famous Last Words" over a mess of majestic guitars and pummeling drums. If he can survive the hell of the preceding 12 tracks and live to tell, we're all obliged to give it a go.
