My Chemical Romance Albums (4)
'The Black Parade Is Dead!'
Release Date 6/24/2008
Tracks 33
Label Reprise
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What The Critics Say
Leave it to My Chemical Romance to call their second full live album -- and their second live release during The Black Parade era -- The Black Parade Is Dead! Unlike 2007's mini-album Live and Rare, which patched together performances from MCR's fall 2006/winter 2007 dates in the U.K. and Europe, The Black Parade Is Dead! is a lavish CD/DVD affair chronicling two performances: the CD captures the band's October 7, 2007, Mexico City date -- their last as the Black Parade -- while the DVD features video of that show as well as their October 24, 2007, date at Maxwell's in their home state of New Jersey. The Black Parade Is Dead!'s grandiosity is only fitting, considering how elaborate The Black Parade was, and also fittingly, the Mexico City show is a song-for-song performance of that album -- the only difference is "The Black Parade Is Dead," where Gerard Way announces to the audience that this is "the last performance of The Black Parade forever!" As on The Black Parade, the highlights happen when My Chemical Romance make these songs about death sound especially lively and theatrical. "Dead!" sounds especially searing, the satirical strut of "Teenagers" has an extra swagger, and the vaudevillian unnamed fan favorite closing track -- now known as "Blood" -- has an even more mischievous spring in its step, while hearing the audience sing back the words to "Welcome to the Black Parade" and "Mama" adds to their resonance. The Maxwell's date, which the band played to a very limited crowd of about 200 or so fans, draws just over half its set list from The Black Parade but also touches on Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge peaks like "Helena," "I'm Not Okay (I Promise)," and "Thank You for the Venom." Even if it seems thorough to the point of being overdone, The Black Parade Is Dead! is a completely appropriate -- and fan-pleasing -- final nail in The Black Parade's coffin. ~ Heather Phares, All Music Guide
What The Critics Say
At the heart of My Chemical Romance lore is the story of lead singer/songwriter/mouthpiece Gerard Way, an animator who decided to abandon illustrations and do "something with his life" in the wake of 9/11. Needless to say, that "important" thing was My Chemical Romance, which quickly rose to prominence among the emo and neo-punk bands that cluttered the rock landscape of the 2000s thanks in large part to "I'm Not OK (I Promise)," a surging piece of emo pop with a hook as ridiculously catchy as its title was ridiculous. It deservedly became a hit on both sides of the Atlantic in 2005, dragging its accompanying album -- 2004's Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge, the group's second -- along for the ride, turning MCR into stars, at least in modern rock circles. But, anybody who didn't follow the fashions of emo and punk closely might have ignored the group's tragic, romantic neo-goth image and merely assumed that MCR was another good poppy punk one-hit wonder, not far removed from, say, Fall Out Boy. My Chemical Romance intended to dispel all such misconceptions with their third album, The Black Parade, an unabashed, old-fashioned concept album, complete with characters wandering through a vague narrative that concerns very big themes like death. Actually, death is the only big theme on The Black Parade, which shouldn't come as a big surprise for a band that named their stopgap live album Life on the Murder Scene, nor should the record's theatricality come as much as a shock, either -- tragedy and melodrama are hardwired in the group's DNA, as illustrated by the often-told tale of Way's inspiration to form the band. Also, it's not as if The Black Parade is MCR's first concept album, either. Their 2002 debut, I Brought You My Bullets, and its follow-up, Three Cheers, told the interlocking story of doomed lovers on the run from vengeful vampires or some such nonsense, but only the hardcore who were willing to analyze endlessly on the Internet were aware of this; based on pure sound, MCR was an emo-punk band through and through, screaming out their feelings as if they were revelations, so it was easy to assume that their music was merely autobiographical. My Chemical Romance took great pains to have The Black Parade seem like its own theatrical work, launching a whole Web-based campaign, filled with videos and interviews explaining how the album tells the tale of "the Patient," a young man dying of cancer in a hospital bed who flashes back on his undistinguished life upon the moment of his death, and how the band got so into this project they considered themselves not My Chemical Romance, but a band called the Black Parade -- shades of the Beatles and Sgt. Pepper! Naturally, those allusions are quite deliberate, and one that MCR played up in that pre-release campaign, dropping liberal reference to Queen (particularly A Night at the Opera) and Pink Floyd's The Wall as well. It was all quite reminiscent of how the Killers set up Sam's Town with endless name-dropping of Bruce Springsteen and U2, but where the Las Vegas quartet wound up with an unholy fusion of these two extremes, MCR never synthesizes; they openly steal from their holy trinity, then graft it upon the sound they've patented. Often, it seems as if they copied The Wall onto tracing paper and placed it upon Three Cheers. The story of The Black Parade is nearly identical to The Wall -- Pink and the Patient run through a litany of childhood and adulthood traumas; absent fathers loom large; many of the main character's flaws are cruelly deemed the fault of the mother -- and there are plenty of flourishes lifted from Roger Waters' magnum opus: the opening fanfare "The End" is a re-creation of "In the Flesh," right down to the churning heavy guitars that come crashing in halfway through, while "Mama" -- shades of "Mother"! -- sounds like Green Day performing "The Trial," as Way affects Billie Joe's affected mock-English accent as he comes tantalizingly close to following "You should have raised a baby girl/I should have been a better son" with "The way you made them suffer/Your exquisite wife and mother/Fills me with the urge to defecate." These are not the only allusions to classic concept albums, either -- as promised, guitarists Ray Toro and Frank Iero conjure Brian May's spirit, "Cancer" recalls Sgt. Pepper as filtered through Oasis -- but The Black Parade doesn't feel like a revival of '70s prog as much as it hearkens back to the twin towers of mid-'90s concept alt-rock: the Smashing Pumpkins' Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness and Marilyn Manson's Antichrist Superstar. Manson's enduring fascination with the grotesque echoes throughout the album, from the artwork through Way's overcooked, bluntly ugly lyrics (highlighted by "soggy from the chemo"), but its heart lies with the Pumpkins, and not just because after his Parade makeover Way strongly resembles Billy Corgan. Like the Pumpkins, My Chemical Romance shares a love of classic metal that manifests itself in both pummeling riffs and soaring guitar solos, plus they also have a flair for melody, two things that give their solipsistic rock muscle and grandeur. If MCR didn't have these gifts, The Black Parade would collapse in a pile of drama club clichés, sophomoric self-pity, and an adolescent obsession with death, yet they manage to skirt such a disaster even if they flirt with it shamelessly. But that doesn't necessarily mean that the album is a triumph. For one, The Black Parade plays a lot straighter than it reads. Sure, it has the marching bands, overdubbed choirs, radio-play theatrics, and Liza Minnelli cameos, a list that makes the album sound like a wild Grand Guignol rock opera but all of that winds up being window dressing to music that often isn't far removed from what My Chemical Romance has done before. Despite all these seemingly fancy accouterments, they're still a modern emo-punk band, which means for all the emotion poured out by their ever-earnest lead singer, there's little grit in their sound and Rob Cavallo's brittle production doesn't help, as its wall of digital sound emphasizes the sonic similarities between the songs instead of their differences. And there are a lot of similarities here: the bulk of the record is firmly within MCR's comfort zone, which helps make the extra flair -- which doesn't arrive as often as it should -- stand out all the more. But even if this isn't quite the radical break that it was intended to be, MCR does their signature blend of Sturm und Drang better than ever -- "Dead!" rushes along on a series of escalating hooks, "This Is How I Disappear" surges with purpose -- and when they're paired with tunes that do break the mold, like the wonderfully pompous title track "Welcome to the Black Parade" or "Teenagers," a tremendous reworking of the "Bang a Gong"/"Cactus" riff that is the simplest and be
'Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge'
Release Date 6/8/2004
Tracks 13
Label Reprise
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What The Critics Say
My Chemical Romance's 2002 debut was a particularly strident entry in that shifty genre of bands tortuously slamming together elements of emo, hardcore, and even metal. Rightly signed to a larger label (in this case, Reprise Records), MCR has returned in 2004 with Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge. With the aid of production major-leaguer Howard Benson, they've edited the slight rookie excesses of I Brought You My Bullets You Brought Me Your Love, resulting in a rewarding, pretty damn relentless product. Ghosts wander through this Sweet Revenge, and the blood-stained lovers of its cover are no joke. "Would I die for you? Well here's your answer in spades...Got you in my sights," Gerard Way wails in "Hang 'Em High." There's also cinematic concepting here -- "The story of a man. A woman. And the corpses of a thousand evil men..." the liners intone. "You Know What They Do to Guys Like Us in Prison" begins "In the middle of a gunfight/In the center of a restaurant." Musically the cut's claustrophobic, messy, and juiced with adrenaline, just like the Tokyo crime caper shootout it was probably inspired by. Picture antiheroes leaping sideways with twin pistols blaring -- in slow motion, you know -- and you're close. Put an old At the Drive-In record on in the background, and suddenly you're shot in the arm and down to your last clip. Economic, treble-kicking production, consistently hyper, "Let's get to the next note NOW!" instrumentation, and great thematic songwriting -- Three Cheers teems with the influences MCR shares with its peers, but recent efforts from fellow travelers Thursday and A.F.I. don't have this furious immediacy, this coarseness that's so appealing. My Chemical Romance seems to have built-in restrictive bindings that prevent it from flying off the handle into quiet-loud screamo stereotyping or odd-bird stopovers into choral parts or maudlin piano. Something like "Ghost of You" might slow the pace, but it doesn't touch the railing guitars or inventively explosive drumming. Album highlights include the propulsive chain shots "Give 'Em Hell Kid" and "To the End," where layers of vocals increase urgency over modernist post-punk, or the raucous "Thank You for the Venom." There's no question of Reprise's high hopes for My Chemical Romance and Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge. But its accessibility pays tribute to anger and bullet holes in black leather. ~ Johnny Loftus, All Music Guide
'I Brought You My Bullets You Brought Me Your Love'
Release Date 7/23/2002
Tracks 11
Label Eyeball
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What The Critics Say
If you're searching for a dose of party music or feel-good escapism, you won't find it on I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love. Lyrically, this debut album by My Chemical Romance is definitely on the dark side; lyrics like "The amount of pills I'm taking counteracts the booze I'm drinking" (from "Honey, This Mirror Isn't Big Enough for the Two of Us") and "I think I'll love to die alone" (from "Cubicles") are typical of the New Jersey band's less than rosy outlook. But like so many angst-ridden alternative pop/rock and punk-pop artists who have emerged in the early 2000s, My Chemical Romance know how to be exuberant and introspective at the same time -- musically, they tend to be aggressive and hard rocking, but lyrically, they're all about introspection. And that combination certainly isn't unique; from Nirvana to blink-182 to Creed -- from post-grunge to emo -- plenty of alterna-rockers have demonstrated that a band can rock aggressively and be introspective at the same time. But if My Chemical Romance are less than groundbreaking, they're good at what they do. Produced by Thursday's lead singer, Geoff Rickly, I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love is a generally decent effort -- one that deals with a lot of negative emotions and does so in a very candid way. Some will find the lyrics depressing, but then, rock music isn't obligated to press the smile button 24 hours a day. Sadness, pessimism, anger, disillusionment -- none of which are difficult to find on this album -- are, like happiness, pleasure, and optimism, valid areas of rock expression. I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love falls short of exceptional, but it's a noteworthy, generally respectable debut for the New Jersey combo. ~ Alex Henderson, All Music Guide
