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Punk_Bling_Girl_85
Bleeding on the Floor
Punk_Bling_Girl_85
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October 27th, 2006 at 07:01am
Article from the Guaridan: THEY HAVE COME FOR YOUR CHILDREN


The Daily Mail says they're a threat to society. Rival bands say they're dangerous. Are My Chemical Romance really as evil as all that? Alexis Petridis finds out

They have come for your children


The Daily Mail says they're a threat to society. Rival bands say they're dangerous. Are My Chemical Romance really as evil as all that? Alexis Petridis finds out

Friday October 27, 2006
The Guardian


Be afraid... My Chemical Romance. Photograph: Sarah Lee



On a wet Wednesday morning, four black-clad teenage girls sit on a wall in Shepherds Bush, staring at the entrance of the sleek boutique hotel where My Chemical Romance are staying. The girls wear determined expressions and the kind of eye make-up that looks like it has been applied while wearing oven gloves. Occasionally, one of them gingerly makes her way across the road and into the hotel lobby. Once there, she nonchalantly attempts to blend into her surroundings. Within seconds, a member of staff gently ushers her back into the rain. With meek, good-humoured resignation, she returns to the wall. A few minutes later, the process starts again.

These are the "emos", the pop-culture tribe recently outed by the Daily Mail as the Dangerous Teen Cult of Self-Harm, a menace to the nation devoted to black hair dye, My Chemical Romance and cutting themselves. Watching them plan their umpteenth timid assault on the hotel's revolving door, they don't look much like a terrifying youth death cult. Someone probably said the same thing about the Manson family just before they set out for Sharon Tate's mansion; none the less, it's hard to work out precisely how severe a threat is posed to society by a few girls who can't even outfox a hotel receptionist.
In a suite several storeys away, My Chemical Romance are inclined to agree. The band's five members make unlikely candidates for leadership of a Dangerous Teen Cult, but they also make unlikely candidates for global rock superstars, which they are in the process of becoming: their record company is confidently predicting sales of 10m for their third album, The Black Parade. Intelligent, disarmingly frank and extremely polite, frontman Gerard Way speaks with the kind of nasal, blue-collar New Jersey accent that, for Britons with a certain taste in cinema, immediately evokes a shadowy world of wiseguys and made men ("Our new album," he says, "right away hadda punch ya and shake the shit oudda ya"Wink. But this rather belies his nerdy previous career as an unsuccessful comic book illustrator, who was spurred to form My Chemical Romance by 9/11. He is handsome, but not in the angular way of the rock frontman: between the curious silver dye-job and the military jacket lurks a rather wholesome, apple-pie face.

By contrast, his brother, bassist Mikey, looks every inch the stuff of middle America's post-Columbine nightmares: his dyed black hair plastered to his head, his eyes ringed with kohl, his skinny frame swathed in a black leather trenchcoat.

Guitarist Frank Iero wears the male emo uniform - tight black jeans, dyed black hair swept over one eye, pierced lip, tattoos - but his fellow guitarist Ray Toro gives the appearance of having been parachuted in from an entirely different band at short notice: his hair is long and frizzy, his expression permanently set to mild bemusement. Jazz-trained drummer Bob Bryar bears more than a passing resemblance to Elbow frontman Guy Garvey. Iero suggests that their peculiar appearance may have something to do with their popularity among adolescents: "They're not fucking ashamed of who they are any more because this cool band came out that is fucking retarded and ashamed and awkward like me, so maybe being retarded and ashamed and awkward is not a bad thing."

"I'm surprised a newspaper thought we were such a threat that they had to write a whole article about us and our fans, calling them a death cult," frowns Gerard Way. His brother wearily points out that we have been here before. "In the 1980s, people thought Judas Priest was promoting suicide," he sighs. "They were like, Dee Snider from Twisted Sister? Dude's in league with the devil, man!"

In addition, they claim not to be an emo band at all: "We're so opposed to it because when we started out there were emo bands all around and we stuck out as not being emo," complains Gerard. "What that translated to is that we couldn't get booked up for shows, no one would take us on tour with them apart from Christian metal bands. We didn't get any of the benefits of being an emo band, our influences didn't come from emo. We just became emo by default, because we became one of the biggest bands from that scene." He quickly corrects himself: "That we weren't even a part of."

You could argue that Way's protestations are par for the course. Since time immemorial, every band self-evidently at the forefront of a musical sub-genre has loudly announced they have absolutely nothing to do with said musical sub-genre, fearful of being swept aside when fashions change. But My Chemical Romance have a stronger case than most, largely because no one seems to have a clue what emo is. It is the business of new movements in youth culture to baffle older onlookers, but emo seems to have gone one stage further, and baffled its actual participants. According to Kerrang! editor Paul Brannigan, the movement's torturous, bewildering history, populated by artists who made no commercial headway in the UK at all, is part of emo's teen appeal. "People's parents are listening to the Kooks and Franz Ferdinand or the Arctic Monkeys," he reasons. "The Arctic Monkeys aren't going to scare off people who like The Kinks and The Jam, but emo, the older generation don't really understand it. They've never heard of any of the bands that were influential, that came before My Chemical Romance. It's something kids can completely call their own."

The "emo" name has been lurking in the US punk underground for 20 years. First, it was shorthand for the "emotional hardcore" plied by mid-1980s Washington DC combos Rites of Spring and Embrace. A decade on, it was used to describe the tuneful, angst-ridden punk-pop of Sunny Day Real Estate, Thursday and Jimmy Eat World. Now it has been appended to My Chemical Romance. The case for the prosecution includes Iero's appearance, their debut beingproduced by a member of Thursday, and the band members' openness about their mental-health issues. One unnamed member apparently suffered a nervous breakdown during the recording of The Black Parade, while Gerard Way's punishing intake of alcohol, cocaine and anti-anxiety drug Xanax - long since abandoned - caused him to become suicidally depressed: "Let me put it this way, I went on tour to Japan and I didn't pack anything because I thought I wasn't coming back."

The case for the defence would note that The Black Parade has absolutely nothing in common musically with Rites Of Spring or Sunny Day Real Estate. A florid concept album about a thirtysomething cancer victim, it variously recalls Pink Floyd's The Wall, T Rex, the tormented oompah of Kurt Weill, Queen and, most unlikely of all, Oasis. It is so deliciously, unrepentantly over the top that when Liza Minnelli makes an unexpected guest appearance on a track called Mama, it barely causes the listener to raise an eyebrow.

Despite all this, the Daily Mail's article has proved hard to ignore. That's partly because it was so shrill and barmy: the last time the Mail got this worked up about a bunch of black-clad youths, they were marching through London's East End with Oswald Mosley and the paper was encouraging readers to join them. But it's also because it seems to have played a substantial role in catapulting My Chemical Romance to stardom in the UK, suddenly lending them the kind of anti-establishment credentials your average adolescent finds profoundly appealing. Previously, the New Jersey quintet had gained a strong following through constant touring - "we'd play shows with hardcore bands or indie rock bands, and you'd see four dudes in the audience dressed in black and wearing eyeliner, looking awkward," says Mikey Way, "then, as the years went by, every show of every band was full of those kids, it was like a chain letter". But since the Mail article, they have rocketed into the singles chart at No 1, a feat The Black Parade is expected to match this Sunday.

The other factor in My Chemical Romance's rise to mainstream stardom seems to have been their appearance at this year's Reading Festival. Plenty of artists have sealed their elevation to the big time via a triumphant summer festival appearance, but My Chemical Romance stole the show at Reading by the unlikely expedient of having bottles thrown at them by disgruntled fans of metal band Slayer, who preceded them on the bill. The Slayer fans were either provoked by My Chemical Romance's music, or Gerard Way's frenetic, mincing stage manner ("right from when we started," says Iero phlegmatically, "people have yelled 'fags' at us"Wink, or the youth of their fanbase. Either way, the column inches most expected to go the Arctic Monkeys or Muse went their way. The hype was increased when fellow alt-rockers Kasabian and the Killers' Brandon Flowers dismissed them in terms your average 14-year-old is likely to find irresistible: the former called them "dark and weird", the latter "dangerous".

Mention of the Reading performance evokes mixed emotions. Iero claims he thought the incident "ruled", but still seems a bit angry - "we have more heart in one fuckin' bead of sweat than most of those people have in their entire bodies". Gerard Way seems positively delighted: "That was our greatest victory as a show," he smiles. "This band was always about facing adversity. We got bottled for being dangerous. We oppose everything that's conventional about rock'n'roll in this country, our home country, everywhere in the world. That weekend, kids were getting beat up in the audience, the guys on stage were getting beat up, and we got through it, just like the kids got through it."

The next day, the kids are much in evidence when My Chemical Romance play a brief set at London's Virgin Megastore. A couple of game parents aside, the audience is almost exclusively under 18 and predominantly female. They maintain an atmosphere of complete hysteria for more than three hours. Long before the band come on, they are screaming, rocking the crash barriers and bellowing along to The Black Parade, which blares incessantly over the in-store PA. By the time My Chemical Romance actually appear, limp bodies are being picked out of the crush. A dazed-looking eight-year-old boy staggers from the crowd in the company of what looks like his older sister: "I think he's going to be sick," she explains, apologetically to a concerned Megastore employee. The sense that something is happening, that the cosy, all-ages-welcome consensus culture that has dominated rock music since Britpop is - for the moment at least - being youthfully shaken, is unmistakeable and undeniably thrilling.

After they play, My Chemical Romance appear for a signing session. A girl in a T-shirt that reads "My Chemical Romance saved my life" starts hyperventilating. Another staggers away from the table clutching her signed single, then bursts into tears in the arms of a nearby adult: a member of the Dangerous Teen Cult of Self-Harm, being cuddled by her mum.

· The Black Parade is out now on Reprise
Not__Me
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October 27th, 2006 at 09:06am
aww thats the coolest article ever!!^^
famous_last_words
Motor Baby
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October 27th, 2006 at 02:12pm
yays! i saw the gardien this morning when i was delivering it and it had the piccy of mcron the front cover and i went crazy thanksss for posting
In Love with Death
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October 27th, 2006 at 02:48pm
omg i almost cried.
fabulous killjoy.
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October 27th, 2006 at 03:17pm
Article from NY Times:

Who says it has been a dull year for rock ’n’ roll? Why, only a few months ago, Angels and Airwaves, the new band led by the former Blink-182 member Tom DeLonge, released a CD that generated “album of this decade” hype. More recently, the Killers created “one of the best albums in the past 20 years.” And even before the new album from My Chemical Romance arrived in shops, there was a sense that “something big” was afoot. All those quotes come from the lead singers, not critics. But that’s a start. And at least one of those lead singers happens to be right. It was Gerard Way, from My Chemical Romance, who told MTV how excited he was about his band’s new album, “The Black Parade” (Reprise/Warner). He said there was “a sense of something big is going to happen and it’s potentially terrifying.” And on Tuesday he was proved right twice. In the morning, that CD hit shops; it’s brilliant. And that night, his band played a thrilling set at Webster Hall. It certainly felt like the start of something big.

It can’t possibly be a coincidence. Now that rock ’n’ roll seems more than ever like a niche genre, a handful of bands are reaching for grandeur. In an age of weightless mp3’s, they want to make weighty albums (whatever that means). Conscious of a rock ’n’ roll power vacuum, these bands are trying to fill it.

Mr. DeLonge’s campaign is perhaps the most surprising. His old band, Blink-182, was known for fizzy pop-punk songs, not grand statements. After the trio split up, he formed Angels and Airwaves, telling MTV, “I want to come out with an album that people will refer to 20 years from now as the album of this decade.” Later, he said his band, which owes a notable debt to U2, was “on the edge of doing something extremely powerful and massive in music.”

Brandon Flowers, from the Killers, has been just as immodest. He has belittled the competition, from Fall Out Boy to Green Day. And he told the British weekly NME that the new Killers album, “Sam’s Town” (Island Def Jam), is “one of the best albums in the past 20 years.” Even better: Mr. DeLonge took offense, hinting that Mr. Flowers had stolen his “20 years” rhetoric.

All three of these bands come from genres known more for youthful energy than for gravitas. Mr. DeLonge’s grand proclamations might be a delayed reaction to the years he spent in Blink-182, a pop-punk band that once released an album (a really good one, too) called, “Enema of the State.” Similarly, the Killers’ debut, “Hot Fuss,” was full of propulsive, vaguely new-wavey singles; now Mr. Flowers is telling interviewers how much he loves Bruce Springsteen. And Mr. Way has talked about wanting to escape the emo scene that nurtured his band; songs on “The Black Parade” nod at influences ranging from Queen to cabaret (thanks to a brief but much-discussed cameo from Liza Minnelli).

This is partly a story about money, too. At a time when lots of major-

label bands are learning how to be content with low six-figure sales, these bands want to keep selling millions of CD’s and filling big rooms. If anything, the industry slump has made bands less shameless about aiming for mainstream success; it’s hard to rail against arena rock when there are hardly any new arena-size bands to rail against. This obsession with bigness is, in part, a small rebellion against a world in which bands shrink themselves to fit MySpace and YouTube. These bands want to make albums that are actually worth $18.98. (A special edition of “The Black Parade,” in an oversized box, has a list price of $44.98.)

Finally, this is partly a story about America. In Britain, where rock ’n’ roll never shrank, strutting major-label bands are a dime a dozen. Not coincidentally, Britain’s biggest and most important band is Arctic Monkeys, a group that followed its small-sounding debut album, “Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not” (Domino), with a couple of mini-CD’s (the second, a charming 10-minute disc called “Leave Before the Lights Come On,” was released on Tuesday) and a distinct lack of pomp or theater. The lead Monkey, Alex Turner, is a shrugger, not a boaster.

But back to America, and to reality. It turned out that the Angels and Airwaves album, “We Don’t Need to Whisper” (Suretone/Geffen), was charming but lightweight; it has sold fewer than half a million copies, according to Nielsen SoundScan. The Killers album sold an impressive 315,000 copies in its first week, but it has a long way to go before it matches “Hot Fuss,” which sold over three million copies. The My Chemical Romance album certainly deserves to be a smash, and first-week sales are sure to be huge. But even that doesn’t make it a sure thing.

It would be easy to say that sales don’t really matter; the music is what matters, right? But when bands acknowledge that they want to be important, they’re also acknowledging that they want to be popular; they’re acknowledging that they care about how they are perceived. And once you have acknowledged that, you have also acknowledged that you might fail. “Something big” might not happen, after all. In that sense, all this seeming hubris might also be read as a form of humility: an acknowledgment that no band can do it alone.

At the Webster Hall concert, Mr. Way still sounded excited about his newly released CD, but he was also sweetly solicitous of the fans who will, he hopes, join the “Parade.” Over and over, he shouted, “Hip, hip,” and the audience responded, “Hooray!” It was hard to tell who was cheering whom.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/26/arts/music/26sann.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
Bess is Yoda
In The Murder Scene
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October 27th, 2006 at 03:28pm
HAIL The Gardian for a decent article!
Demolition Lover Jo
Thinking Happy Thoughts
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October 27th, 2006 at 04:43pm
head1stforhalos:
This weeks NME:

http://img228.imageshack.us/img228/6417/nme10je6.jpg
http://img228.imageshack.us/img228/4149/nme11eb8.jpg
http://img154.imageshack.us/img154/101/nme12vf8.jpg
http://img205.imageshack.us/img205/2918/nme13rk8.jpg
http://img154.imageshack.us/img154/9867/nme14rz6.jpg

And a quote from Paris Hilton about MCR when an NME journalist hung out with her, L.Lo & Courtney Love:

http://img49.imageshack.us/img49/298/nmequoteewgu5.jpg

Don't get all pissy with me for posting something Paris Hilton said about MCR please. (yes I've been bitched at about it by someone Sad)


i've always hated NME, but that article made me groan. look at this one:
http://img205.imageshack.us/img205/2918/nme13rk8.jpg
Look at the pic in the top left corner: My Comical Romance: Frank jokes with a fan. is that even Frank? it sure dont look like him. AND they spelt his surname wrong. Lero? RAWR!!!!!
Punk_Bling_Girl_85
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October 28th, 2006 at 05:44am
demolitionjo:


i've always hated NME, but that article made me groan. look at this one:
http://img205.imageshack.us/img205/2918/nme13rk8.jpg
Look at the pic in the top left corner: My Comical Romance: Frank jokes with a fan. is that even Frank? it sure dont look like him. AND they spelt his surname wrong. Lero? RAWR!!!!!


No that IS NOT FRANK like 100% I thought they were just taking the piss I didn't realise it was a mistake LMAO. Oh and yes I noticed the "Lero" thing straight away, it drives me mad when they can't even get their names right. I liked the article though other than that, in general I don't like to read NME its far too indie in my opinion and i'm not really into most of the bands it usually interviews/writed about.
Bess is Yoda
In The Murder Scene
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October 28th, 2006 at 05:57am
^ I agree, totally. I hardly ever read NME unless MCR are in it, which is kinda rare. And even when they are in it, there will be a shit-load of letters by a bunch of misinformed twats slagging them off.
ImNotOkay3505
Salute You in Your Grave
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October 28th, 2006 at 12:45pm
Punk_Bling_Girl_85:
demolitionjo:


i've always hated NME, but that article made me groan. look at this one:
http://img205.imageshack.us/img205/2918/nme13rk8.jpg
Look at the pic in the top left corner: My Comical Romance: Frank jokes with a fan. is that even Frank? it sure dont look like him. AND they spelt his surname wrong. Lero? RAWR!!!!!


No that IS NOT FRANK like 100% I thought they were just taking the piss I didn't realise it was a mistake LMAO. Oh and yes I noticed the "Lero" thing straight away, it drives me mad when they can't even get their names right. I liked the article though other than that, in general I don't like to read NME its far too indie in my opinion and i'm not really into most of the bands it usually interviews/writed about.



And in that fake Frank picture is says "My comical romance"

Oh wait..is it supposed to be like that? LMAO
ImNotOkay3505
Salute You in Your Grave
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October 28th, 2006 at 12:46pm
oh shit i'm an idiot. LMAO

lmfao
famous_last_words
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October 28th, 2006 at 01:36pm
the album of the week review from msn

My Chemical Romance: "The Black Parade"Surely destined to be the album that makes MCR household names, The Black Parade is no ordinary rock record.


Produced by Rob Cavallo (Green Day) this is a classic concept album following a character called the patient who reflects on his life from his death bed. Sounds cheery huh? Well surprisingly it mostly is. The band have a reputation for being miserablists and while that's true of some of their subject matter, musically they're more about sheer euphoria.


The two pronged sucker punch opening of End and Dead will leave you totally breathless, so exhilarating are the supersonic hooks and Gerard's incredible soaring vocals.


The album was influenced by three records - Sgt Pepper by The Beatle's, Pink Floyd's The Wall and most tellingly Queen's A Night At The Opera. The bombastic tone of tracks like House Of Wolves certainly owe a debt to the theatricality of Brian May and co's early work. However, there's also plenty of shade to balance with the light, none more so than brutally upfront ballad called Cancer which sounds like a modern take on Alabama Song with it's eerie East European chord progression.


It all makes for a quite an adventure, one that certainly demands your attention and you'll feel rewarded for it. My Chemical Romance have just become one the most important bands on the planet, of that there is no doubt.
I_am_the_Penguin
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October 28th, 2006 at 02:24pm
http://metromix.chicagotribune.com/reviews/critics/mmx-gv52euq6o.7oct27,1,2459523.story
Chemical Romance looks ready for a bigger stage
By Andy Downing

October 27 2006, 12:35 PM CDT

Midway through My Chemical Romance's smoldering performance at a sold-out House of Blues, frontman Gerard Way lashed out at the current state of the world, announcing, "You're never going to solve your problems with violence."

But for an hour on Thursday, Way and his cohorts did exactly that, regaling the crowd with 15 tales of death, self-destruction and psychological meltdown. The band, making a rare theater appearance to celebrate the release last Tuesday of its latest album, "The Black Parade" (Reprise), looked and sounded ready for a bigger stage, debuting a host of fist-pumping guitar-thrashers and, in at least one instance, a lighter-friendly power ballad.

Of course, this being MCR, the ballad ("Cancer"Wink was delivered from the point of view of a cancer patient whose body is "soggy from the chemo." "Black Parade," a concept album centered on a young man dying in a hospital room, is loaded with gruesome imagery — amputations, blood running down walls and lurking vampires. Thankfully, the group doesn't wallow in the murk, channeling its disenchantment into bombastic, stadium-ready anthems.

Onstage, the songs often sounded like holdovers from the '70s glam era. "Mama" hijacked the melody from the Doors' "Alabama Song" and turned it into a cabaret production, a theatrical Way stalking the stage as if it were a catwalk. Drummer and Chicago native Bob Bryar, who worked as a stagehand at HoB for a number of years, drove "House of Wolves" with a rainfall of toms as relentless as a heavyweight backing his opponent into the ropes. "Welcome to the Black Parade" was part funeral procession and part jamboree, marching through several tempo shifts like a deejay mash-up of Queen and Iron Maiden. On "Dead!" Way howled for the end as the twin guitars of Frank Iero and Ray Toro cut through his cold sweats like surgical scalpels.

When the band rolled into Chicago in September 2005, it was prepared for battle, with Way, brown locks dangling at his shoulders, equipping himself in a bulletproof vest. This time out the singer's hair was shorn and dyed platinum blond (reportedly to better portray the Patient, the central character in MCR's latest opus), and the entire quintet was decked out like a gothic marching band. The updated look suggests a level of vulnerability that wasn't evident in the confident performance. The band wisely maintained its cocksure swagger even as the bodies, and regrets, piled up.

ctc-tempo@tribune.com

In Sunday Arts, Greg Kot reviews the new CD by My Chemical Romance.
fabulous killjoy.
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October 28th, 2006 at 02:59pm
Bess is Yoda
In The Murder Scene
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October 28th, 2006 at 05:50pm
Thanks so much for those scans!
fabulous killjoy.
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October 28th, 2006 at 08:23pm
np. :]
my chemical romance.
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October 29th, 2006 at 05:56pm
Thanks for those scans, they're awesome.

They were in yesterday's edition fo The London Free Press.. The picture was just the.. Uh, one with Gerard screaming, and where Mikey looked like he didn't have any eyes.

I typed up the article.. Sorry about any typos.




MyChem creates a classic
Every generation gets an epic album to call its own. In the '60s there was Sgt. Pepper. In the '70s, Ziggy Stardust, Night at the Opera, and The Wall. In the '80s and '90s, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, Anti-Christ Superstar and Use Your Illusion I and II. In the new millennium, we've had American Idiot. And now we've got the Black Parade, a disc that cherry-picks bits and pieces of all those predecessors and reworks them into a dark, stunning epic for the post-9/11 world.

Yes, that's right, We're mentioning My Chemical Romance, in the same breath as Bowie, Queen, Floyd, Guns N' Roses, Green Day and the Beatles. Sure, they're a bunch of emo upstarts from New Jersey. But one spin of their third CD is all it takes to know Gerard Way and company have earned their place in the rock pantheon – if only for their boundless ambition and laser-focus determination.

CD REVIEWS.........
With The Black Parade, they clearly set out to craft the album of their careers. And they've succeeded.

From it's first second to its final fadeout, this 52 minute disc has all the ingredients of a classic. It's got a heavy yet simple concept: The inevitable of death. It's got a vague plotline – something about a cancer patient's ife flashing before his eyes in his final seconds – that will reward fanatics without deterring causal listeners. T's got orchestras and choirs, bombastic arrangements and cinematic production, operatic vocals and layers of harmony stadium sized riffs and soaring solos, effects and even vocals by Liza Minnelli. Toss in some outfits that make My Chem look like Sgt. Pepper in Purgatory and what more do you want?

Well, you want great songs. The black parade has about 14 of them. Case in point: First single Welcome to the Black Parade. It kicks off with a stark, haunting piano and a mournful martial snare supporting Way's keening vocal. As weeping guitars weave into the mix, the whole affair builds into a stately orch-rock crescendo – and then shifts gears, exploding into a choppy, charging pop-punk anthem that crosses Freddie Mercury and Billie Joe.

On any other album, it would be a standout. Here, it's got plenty of competition. The End is a dark cloud of Floydian despair set to a beeping heart monitor. Dead! Is bouncy pogo-punk that turns “Wouldn't it be great if we were dead?” into a singalong – and then winkingly inserts Woody Woodpecker's laughing melody into tis guitar solo. Other Buzzsaw rockers such as This is How I Disappear, the robotically pumping Sharpest Lives, and the thumping House of Wolves keeps the engine running. Gran power ballads like I Don;t Lvoe You, Cancer, Sleep, and Disenchanted give the moshpit a chance to hoist the cellphones. Mama take us to an Eastern European battlefield, with an ethnic gypsy ambiance burrowed from Gogol Bordello and Minnellia as Mother War. Teenagers time-travels to the glittery glory days of glam, with its swaggering boogie-rock and generation gap lyrics.

In the end, though, The Black Parade is about unity, not division. And when Way wails “We'll carry on” he makes it clear MyChem choose life, not death. Set against the widescreen canvas of their relentless creative drive, it marks this a disc for all ages – and for music lovers of all ages.

(Header)
FLAMBOYANT: My Chemical Romance's new album, The Black Parade, is a mortality-obsessed concept album, which loosely revolves around a dying hospital patient. But for all the death, doom and desperation that stalk the album, it's actually a festive and flamboyant march into the great beyond. The album, which features vocals by Gerald Way, in the centre of the photo, hit stores this week..



Woot. Go Gerald. Nice work LFP. =)
In Love with Death
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October 30th, 2006 at 10:25pm
^ gerald again. lol . oh well at least it was a good review!!
bound and gagged
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November 1st, 2006 at 09:06am
MCR is breifly mentioned in this month's SPIN
oceanic 815.
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November 1st, 2006 at 09:54am
Saint_Emilina:
With the new album, My Chemical Romance has guaranteed itself a future in rock, reckons ANN POWERS
Gerard Way trained all his life to be a rock star. Like Iggy Pop, the 29-year old New Jersey native grew up weird in working-class America, a bundle of energy, stigmatized by the bullies in his neighborhood.
Like Jim Morrison, he found death fascinating, and he cultivated his morbid streak in the manner of metal gods from Ozzy to Danzig, gobbling up graphic novels and horror flicks. Like John Lennon, he liked to draw and went to art school. He also explored acting, developing a style both chameleon and camp- David Bowie, check
After all this prep work, Way finally formed a band. He followed Ray Davies’ lead and signed up his little brother first. Mikey Way was a bass player though, and Gerard needed a lead guitarist.
He found one whose belief in rock’s emotional punch tempered his own calculation: frizzy haired metal-head Ray Toro. That was his Mick Jagger move.
As a final touch, Way recruited punk kid Frank Iero as rhythm guitarist, because as W. Axl Rose will tell you, rock after 1977 has to be a little hard-core.’
And so, My Chemical Romance became the most perfectly self-conceptualized band of a highly self-conscious generation. Two albums of screamy pop-punk made them stars of the amorphous “emo” scene, but with The Black Parade, Way and his mates render such labels pointless. This song cycle about dreaming of death, based around the story of one cancer patient’s demise, creates a new role for rock in the age of virtual reality.
The Black Parade blends heavy, raw metal-punk with highly theatrical pop, a move that in itself isn’t that fresh. Forget Queen and Bowie, the inevitable reference points, or even rock opera masters Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice, who got pretty intense on Jesus Christ Superstar; the Kinks and the Who were doing this stuff back in 1966.
As for more recent touch points, Green Day is the obvious one; that band’s long-time producer, Rob Cavallo, helmed The Black Parade, and he leads My Chemical Romance into the quick stylistic turns that won the Bay Area band a Grammy for American Idiot.
Way’s lyrics aren’t wildly original, either. His metaphors, like his brassy vocals, are inked in bold colors; he hasn’t yet found the inner tenderness to counter his fury. For all this screaming, self-control matters a lot to Way; he’s a former nerd, remember, and guys like that fear self-exposure.
The most disturbing words on The Black Parade come in the echoing Sleep, when a tape-recorded voice (it’s unclear if it’s Way’s) haltingly describes the physical feeling of death; the simple cry, “I can’t wake up!” bears more weight than all of Way’s images of vampires and runny blood.
These problems would undermine a more conventional album. But what makes The Black Parade so exciting isn’t anything rock is quite used to. Each previous generation used music to search for some kind of truth: The 1960s counterculture exploded with sensual liberation and hippie jams; 1970s punk bristled with disgust at capitalism’s excesses; 1990s grunge remade classic rock in a rebellion against conventional masculinity. My Chemical Romance expresses the next generation’s quest by redrawing the boundaries of reality itself.
Like Way training to be a rock star, the audience that’s embraced My Chemical Romance lives in roles as much as in “real” life: playing video games for hours, building online relationships, homes and cities; creating powerful identities that have little to do with the physical limits of their daily lives.
The advent of this virtual world is changing the psyches of the young. Way is of that world. Steeped in the mythologies of comic books, B-movies, and heavy metal, yet attuned to punk’s immediacy, he’s become adept at writing songs that unite the concrete and the chimerical, and he’s built a band that can evoke this strange new space.
This is different from what rock usually does. The most theatrical of traditional rockers still sought to uncover what Richard Hell once called, in a song, “really, really real”: the pulse of sexuality, the rage for liberation, the lure of death. But in Way’s songs, the authentic and the imagined are inseparable; they create each other, even in death.
This insistence that what’s imagined is also profoundly real plays put musically in the band’s fusion of the theatrical and the raw. Even David Bowie wasn’t so convinced that the pompous and the primal should never be separated. To ears trained to classic rock, this mishmash can be alienating. Something seems to be missing: that moment when performers’ humanity breaks through. There’s little sex or unbridled joy in songs such as Disenchanted or How I Disappear; Way sometimes seems to think his body is his enemy. “A drink for the horror that I’m in,” sings this recovered alcoholic. “There’s no way that I’m coming back again.”
By the end of that song, Famous Last Words, Way has declared his commitment to life but isn’t sure if the lover who lies next to him is “awake an unafraid, alive or dead”; he’s entered a netherworld in which imagination is the only reality. This is horror movie stuff, but it’s also something the young fans of My Chemical Romance can relate to. Some might say it’s even a vision of the future. It’s definitely part of the future of rock – LAT-WP.
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This is a newspaper article from The Star Malaysia.
I wanted to scan it but my scanner is dead. Cry There's also a pic of Gerard and Frank performing during the 2005 VMAs.
Sadly, it didn't mention Matt or Bob. Cry