My Chemical Romance - The Black Parade
My Chemical Romance
The Black Parade
Release Date: October 20th, 2006
Label: Reprise
Review by Jared Stossel
It takes serious guts to make a full-length album. It takes even more of a constitution to make a full-length album that ends up being far more ambitious than any of your peers, likening the ending of a relationship to dying of cancer. It is the personification of depression and the release of anxiety in one of the most hauntingly beautiful albums I’ve ever listened to. I mentioned in a previous review that My Chemical Romance’s sophomore endeavor, Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge, is a masterpiece. Their follow-up, The Black Parade, takes the word masterpiece and redefines it for an entirely new generation. Calling it a masterpiece is an understatement.
Three Cheers was a massive success, earning them airtime on MTV and Fuse, spots on the cover of national publications, and even a run opening for labelmates Green Day on their American Idiot stadium tour (2004-2005 was an amazing period of time for Reprise Records). By the time the band were ready to sit down and record The Black Parade, Inner turmoil, unchecked mental health, and unreconciled problems with addiction were boiling to the surface. For a number of weeks, the band set up shop at the haunted (yes, really) Paramour Estate in Los Angeles, CA. Personal relationships reached their breaking point, and personal matters began to seep through the walls. The fact that the band believed they were seeing things overall that were, let’s say, “not of this world” didn’t help the situation.
The fact that the members believed they were encountering spirits is a bit ironic; The Black Parade is a concept album of epic proportions, following a patient that’s introduced in the theatrical opening track, “The End”. Vocalist Gerard Way has stated that he believes death comes to you in any form that you choose, and for The Patient, it comes to him in the form of a parade. For nearly fifty minutes, listeners are taken on a voyage through the afterlife as our main character traverses through the spirit world. My Chemical Romance are often referred to as an “emo” band, and while they may fit in with their peers in this scene, the music on The Black Parade pulls from influences well outside of the emo-sphere. There are more references and inspirational moments from Queen’s “ A Night at the Opera”, Pink Floyd’s The Wall, and The Beatles Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band than there are to any eyeliner-wielding, hair straightening contemporaries of theirs that dominated the scene. There’s a reason that The Black Parade hit number 2 on the US Billboard 200 upon its release.
“The End” builds into “Dead!”, which finds The Patient entering the afterlife to a track with the same bounce as Electric Light Orchestra’s “Mr. Blue Sky”. I’ve often said that the moment I was indoctrinated as a My Chemical Romance fan was when I first heard “Welcome To The Black Parade”, but I may have to change that statement; upon relistening to the album, I believe it was when I heard Ray Toro’s guitar solo on “Dead!”. At that point on my journey as a fan of music, I had never heard a guitar player like that. I would later discover thrash metal, but at that moment, I was enamored. “Dead!” is followed up with “This Is How I Disappear”, one of their most underrated songs (and one that I’m happy to see is being played more often on this current tour). The musicianship on it, from the mystifying opening build up, to the vicious breakdown with Way screaming “And now, you wanna see how far down I can sink?” as the band roars behind him. “The Sharpest Lives” invokes the darkness on one of The Black Parade’s venomous tracks, a metaphor for addiction that builds into an explosive chorus (“Give me a shot to remember/And you can take all the pain away from me/Your kiss and I will surrender/The sharpest lives are the deadliest to lead”). Way takes his lyricism to another level with lines like “There’s a place in the dark where the animals go/You can take off your skin in the cannibal glow/Juliet loves the beat and the lust it commands/Drop the dagger and lather the blood on your hands, Romeo”. Not even The Smiths could have come up with a verse as sinister as that.
The centerpiece of The Black Parade is the pseudo-title track, “Welcome to The Black Parade”. If there is anything that this band will let history remember them by, it will be for this song. It’s highly ambitious in scope, the full version clocking in around five minutes. You can hear the Queen influence as the song slowly builds, more and more tracks on the mixing board being introduced as a full marching band and choir kick in. The band lets the final “G” note ring out, before drummer Bob Bryar plays a drum fill, signaling the chaos that’s about to begin. “Welcome to The Black Parade” speeds up and slows down constantly, and on paper, nothing about this song should work. But it does, and it’s fucking maniacally beautiful.
The antithesis of the fifth track is “I Don’t Love You”, a slower paced track, and one of the oldest songs prior to the recording of the album (there’s actually footage of the band recording a demo on the bus in their documentary Life on the Murder Scene, released years prior to The Black Parade). “I Don’t Love You” is a confessional piece, the main character coming to grips with the truth about a relationship that has been manifesting for some time (at least, that’s how I interpret it). As The Patient walks along the road, we encounter “House of Wolves”, a track that I once Ray Toro describe as “if Mötorhead and Stray Cats were in a dive bar together, playing the jukebox”. It’s strangely accurate, with the tom-tom hits of a swing band juxtaposed against a monstrous wall of guitars as Way screams bloody murder with lyrics like “You better run like the devil ‘cause they never gonna leave you alone/You better hide up in the alley ‘cause they’re never gonna find you a home”. It is one of my favorite songs of all time, My Chemical Romance-related or otherwise.
There’s really no denying that the most impactful song on The Black Parade is “Cancer”, a piano-driven ballad that marks the half-way point in the album. I find myself skipping it when I relisten, not just because of the seriousness of the material, but because it’s so brutally honest. It’s about death, the end of life, acting as the metaphorical equivalency of the conclusion of relationships, of moments in life. It grabs your attention whenever it comes on, and it forces you to listen. It’s one of the most powerful songs from any band in this genre, period. “Mama” follows, which finds Way at his most demented, channeling different voices and bring war-time characters to life against a guitar-driven bounce that sounds like something out of an old Western. The sound of bombs being dropped ricochet off the speakers, and the bridge on “Mama” is incendiary; one of my favorite film clips from this era came from their Black Parade Is Dead live film, where pyro engulfed the stage. And who else would provide the voice of the Mother War character on an album as batshit crazy as this one other than Liza Minnelli?
“Sleep” opens with the sound of a tape being played, rewound, and stretched, actual sound footage from Way recanting the night terrors he was experiencing when living at the Paramour mansion for the album’s writing sessions. The album’s tenth track is a dark, melancholic opus of art that culminates in a frenetic breakdown, some of the largest “wall of sound” guitar tracks that could ever be heard on Parade. What follows next is one of the most upbeat songs on The Black Parade, the one that feels most out of place, the one that was initially envisioned as a playful jam session, but ending up becoming one of their biggest songs. On the surface, “Teenagers” is a bright song with a riff that sounds more like T. Rex than anything, presenting lyrics that touch on adolescent rage, youth violence, and paranoia. My Chemical Romance have managed to write a song that is completely timeless; it’s been years since I’ve been one, yet teenagers still scare the living shit out of me.
My favorite ballad track on The Black Parade is “Disenchanted”, the album’s penultimate song. It’s the only time other than “The End” when we hear an acoustic guitar being utilized, Toro plucking the opening notes, pushing the band into arena rock territory as the song opens its heart to the world. It’s a beautiful piece, and every time it plays, it manages to send me back to where I was the first time I heard it. I remember where I was, who I wanted to be with, and everything that was going through my head.
Every concept album needs a monumental finale. There may be no greater closing track on an album than “Famous Last Words”. When things were at their worst, when they were struggling with writers’ block, with uncertainty about whether the band would continue forward, this was the song that pulled them out of the darkness. It’s the sound of five people who have put their foot on the gas, hurtling towards the light at the end of the tunnel. If I’m in the right mindset, the song’s closing brings me tears. It feels more like the conclusion of a tightly constructed film. With the darkness behind them, and the band heading toward the bright lights of Battery City, The Black Parade comes to an end. After about a minute, an old-timey-sounding piano riff kicks in, Way singing through a megaphone making him sound more like an orderly at the mental institution in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest as “Blood” plays like an epilogue, the credits rolling.
I’ve read almost everything out there about the conception, release, and reception to this album. I know that the band love it, but I know that they went through hell and back to get it done. You can feel the darkness in this album, the release of tensions, and the catharsis that came with exposing their vulnerabilities. This might be my favorite rock record of all time. The Black Parade is a work of art.
My Chemical Romance
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