Music Review
‘Parade’ ushers in new MCR sound

By Justin Wymer
St. Albans High School

After two years without a new album, My Chemical Romance recently released its new album, “The Black Parade,” to the delight of thousands of fans. The band’s old sound was gone, clichés were relinquished and any uncertainty of its role as a prodigious band was removed.

From the second I saw the cover, I was astounded. Two different covers for the CD were released: black and white. I attained the rarer black version. The album art was gorgeous, albeit cryptic, and embedded with heaps of symbolic illustrations — a hospital patient marching barefoot alongside a parade of specters, enveloped in a sickly aura of light.

Because MCR had kept its new CD such a secret, I was apprehensive about what I might find musically. When I hit play, the old tunes were forgotten, their conventional rifts scattered like the fragments of a dream. What replaced them was a fresh, eclectic blend of all types of rock, emo-core, orchestral music and even jazz.

The CD opens with the sound of an undulating heart monitor and an unusually soulful piece by lead guitarist Ray Toro. The song, “The End,” serves as an introductory piece, previewing some of the tenets found later in the album.

The next song, “Dead,” begins with the sound of heart monitor gone flat — a death, in a sense. Then, Toro and bassist Mikey Way (singer Gerard’s brother) provide one of the most scintillating guitar duos I’ve heard in ages.

Tracks like “Dead,” “Famous Last Words” and “The Sharpest Lives” are even more daring in lyrics than in sound. They underscore themes such as death’s inevitability, the importance of impression and the perils of an unfulfilled life. Such topics are universal and can be enjoyed by connoisseurs of all genres of music.

In addition, such quirks as backup voicing by the Way’s parents can be heard on some tracks.

Although its music has morphed drastically, MCR stays true to its thematic tendencies. Gerard believes that death presents itself in the guise of one’s strongest memory, so in this album, a character was created — a moribund cancer patient whose most vivid memory is the image of a parade glimpsed during childhood. Upon passing, death “marches” with the patient to his ultimate destination.

Gerard went so far as to crop his hair perilously short and bleach it an unearthly blond to coincide with the ill character he created. I personally think he went a bit farther than necessary to promote the album — it didn’t need such a gimmick. With its new sound and powerful lyrics, “The Black Parade” sold itself.