Chemo Therapy

My Chemical Romance
The Black Parade

Reprise
October 24, 2006

A few months ago, My Chemical Romance frontman Gerard Way did something shocking: He got a haircut, reducing his raven locks to a razor-cropped platinum dome. In our earliest image of MCR two years ago, Way bellowed a mall-mauling confessional through his bangs in the video for “I’m Not Okay (I Promise).” Way rebranded with a buzz cut? It’s like taking the Colonel’s face off the KFC logo.

Maybe he went to the barber so people won’t confuse him with the guy from Panic! At the Disco. But more likely, Way was clearing head space for an artistic undertaking unprecedented in pop-punk, even by (gasp) Green Day.

True, My Chem has never shied away from melodrama. “I’m Not Okay” and the lovelorn bruiser “Helena,” from their 2004 breakthrough Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge, were almost celebratory emotional bloodlettings. But this summer, MCR’s MySpace page hinted at bigger ambitions. Hosting a mock press conference, the band — Way, bassist Mikey Way, drummer Bob Bryar, guitarists Frank Iero and Ray Toro — sat in front of a sign that read THE BLACK PARADE, which they claim is their new name. (They refer to My Chem as “they.”) In fact, Way’s new coif isn’t “his” hair at all, but that of the Patient, the character he plays on the new project.

Every lazy trick-or-treater knows you can score candy by throwing on bloodstained scrubs. But in an age of bird flu and bio-terror, and when every kid in school is on more pills than your grandma, the hospital room as metaphoric theater of pain has deep resonance.

“You’ve got front-row seats to the Penitent’s Ball/When I grow up I want to be nothing at all,” Way sings over we-are-the-champions fanfare on the opener, “The End.” On Black Parade, My Chem work a double shift attending to an ER of the abandoned, dejected, addicted and afflicted. Way isn’t just the patient, he’s Dr. Evil and Dr. Feelgood, sharing suffering and deepening it.

In the forlorn “Disenchanted,” he’s the idealistic music fan watching his heroes hawk products on TV. Then, on the flame-throwing thrasher “This Is How I Disappear,” he’s the walking-dead rocker, hitting the stage to “drain all my blood and give the kids a show.” In “Cancer,” he’s a chemo casualty glimpsing the great beyond through symphony strings. On “Sleep,” he bitterly says good-bye to a dying friend with as much contempt for the dying as for the sickness itself.

Pretentious? Naturally. They cite Queen and System of a Down as influences, but they’ve created the Sgt. Pepper of screamo. The Black Parade is a richly orchestrated tour de force. It’s got strings, horns, Old World digressions, novelistic threads and the potential to render the artistic competition pretty much moot. After Sgt. Pepper, hippies painted one another’s faces and had sex without exchanging names. It’s hard to know what kind of Facebook freakout will dawn when The Black Parade hits stores, but the Internet will definitely need some R&R come Thanksgiving.

Way inhabits his shifting perspectives — from victim to toe-tagger — with method-actor brilliance. He can play the bitter food-court refugee, the study-hall stalker, the piano man and the metal messiah. It helps that he’s got versatile guitarists who can flash from the buoyant peals of “Dead!” to the blues-busting tumult of “House of Wolves,” as well as a solid, speedy rhythm section. And it helps that Green Day producer Rob Cavallo has experience giving rich thematic scope to pop-punk.

What emerges is a bravura performance by people who can’t stop yelling about how miserable they are, a grand statement stitched together out of frayed nerves. In “Welcome to the Black Parade,” Way’s father lays an almost Christ-like burden on his sickly son: “Would you be the savior of the broken, the beaten and the damned?” Five minutes, three stylistic shifts, an orchestra and a marching band later, Way protests, “I’m just a man/I’m not a hero.” Give him time. A few more trips to the stylist and he might save the world.

Download: “Welcome to the Black Parade,” “Dead!,” “Teenagers”

Out Now:
The Black Parade