My Chemical Romance’s The Black Parade

My Chemical Romance released their third album, The Black Parade, on October 31, 2006. This album is clearly an attempt to break away from the image they cultivated for themselves through their first two releases, I Brought you my Bullets, you Brought me Your Love (July 2002) and Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge (September 2004). Granted, it’s conceivable that a band was a little less than pleased to be commonly referred to as the epitome of the much-derided genre of “screamo” music. So maybe it really was time for a change. But was it wise to ditch the “screaming” and whole-heartedly embrace the “emo”?

The band was formed after front man Gerard Way and one of his friends (Matt Pelissier, a former drummer in the band) wrote “Skylines and Turnstiles” in response to the September 11 attacks. The band, still in the process of formalizing their roster of permanent members, released I Brought you my Bullets in 2002, on Eyeball Records. It followed the release of this album signing with Enterprise Records, and then going on tour with Avenged Sevenfold (click here for Avenged Sevenfold’s official site; click here for its myspace page). Having collected a fan base while on tour, My Chemical Romance released Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge, to much acclaim. It went platinum in less than a year, due in large part to “Helena”, “The Ghost of You”, and “I’m Not Okay (I Promise”.

The Black Parade was poised to ride the wave of commercial acclaim that followed Three Cheers. But the band released an album that didn’t need to rely on former success to cultivate airplay. The Black Parade is, in a word, mainstream. I don’t want to sound like a music snob, turning up my nose at anything that isn’t alternative. I admit, I enjoy listening to the occasional Fallout Boy or Panic! at the Disco album, regardless of how mainstream those bands might be. So it’s not that I was particularly opposed the sound of The Black Parade, per se, but rather its sound as compared to the sound of earlier releases.

On the bright side, this is one of the first albums I’ve written about in this blog whose lyrics didn’t disappoint me. There’s some very impressive vocab choices (some examples–”penitence”, “squeamish”, “contrition”). And pretty much every song has at least one really well-crafted lyrical moment (some more examples–”You play ring around the ambulance” from “House of Wolves”; “If you could coddle the infection/They could amputate at once/You should have been/I should have been a better son!” from “Mama”).

But the music, on the other hand, is far from ideal. There’s a jumpy, grating drum line that drags through the whole album, making one song blend into the next. The guitar is undefined and chaotic; every song sounds mashes together, like there’s too much music and every guitar line is piled on top of another guitar line, fighting to be the dominant line. And here’s the kicker: the drawn-out, overly-heartfelt, ’80s rock vocals and the ubiquitous power chords make the album sound, most likely contrary to the band’s intentions, as though it was recorded as a tribute to Bon Jovi circa 1986 (around the time when they released Slippery When Wet, the album containing “You Give Love a Bad Name”, and “Wanted Dead or Alive”.

To sum up, The Black Parade is listenable. Not horrible, not wonderful. My main complaints are this: that the band abandoned its trademark screams for a sound more akin to ’80s hair-band rock, and that the music sounds more like a group of boys got together and made as much noise as possible on various instruments than a genuine composition. But if you’re willing to overlook the shortcomings, and listen to a mediocre recording with a couple redeeming lines, The Black Parade wouldn’t be the worst choice.

Modest Mouse’s We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank

This week I want to talk about Modest Mouse’s latest release, We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank. But before I do, I feel that I have to come clean about something. I’m not one of those die-hard Modest Mouse fans that followed them long before they had any mainstream success. I hopped on the bandwagon after the release of Good News For People Who Like Bad News. Even now, I own most of it’s earlier releases, but I would only really call myself a fan of Modest Mouse circa 2004 and later.

That said, in many ways I wasn’t disappointed by We Were Dead, which was released on March 30 this year. At least, I wasn’t disappointed in it the first time I listened to it. Even the second time through, I appreciated the arrangement and some of the lyrics. But then I listened to it a third time.

The album opens with “March into the Sea”. After an odd and half-hearted accordion intro, the grunge guitar, coupled with front man Isaac Brock chuckling throatily to the beat of the song, draws in the listener. The sound itself lives up to the band’s precedent. What I realized the more I listened, though, was that the lyrics fell short. Unable to follow the plot of the song by just listening to it, I Googled the lyrics. (Click here to view the lyrics of every song on We Were Dead.) “March into the Sea” opens like this: “If food needed pleasing/You’d suck all the seasoning off/Lick it off!” The lyrics that follow are even more muddled and nonsensical. A sampling:

“I’ll be beating my heart’s record for speeding
I’ll be beating the record for heart skipping

Oh, the doggone tails, well they fell off
But we just turned back, marched into the sea
..Well, we just turned around, marched into the sea

Take all that you need
Let my saxophone free
Till it’s gone, till it’s gone

Well, this coffee you bleed
Like the leaves of a tree
Ahaha! Ahaha!

Let’s shake hands if you want
But you– both hands are gone!
Oh, haha! Haha!”

Admittedly, most of the songs are not quite as disjointed as the first one. Not lyrically, anyway. Most of the album is much like everything else Modest Mouse has released–a jaded and cynical collection of melancholy musings. The only novelty that We Were Dead adds to the repertoire is an abundance of ship imagery. I don’t mean to imply that this is entirely bad. I like their earlier work, and would have been disappointed if I couldn’t see any of the band I knew coming through in the most recent release. But as my roommate (whom I look to as my musical guru) said, “they’re capitalizing on the image they’ve made for themselves. . . they have this niche that they’ve carved out, and their new album should do something new, not just re-do what they’ve already done.”

“It’s still good, it’s just not interesting or novel.”

That pretty much sums up the accomplishments of We Were Dead. The band certainly succeeded at perpetuating the sound that made them famous, but fell short of achieving anything noteworthy with their new album.

I assumed that the album title was mostly just a nod to the album’s nautical theme. But the more I listened to it, I began to wonder if it was a little more prophetic. If the album itself were a ship, it certainly did sink in a slew of mediocre reviews (click here for the Rolling Stone Review, and here customer reviews from Amazon.com). Could it have been more of an admission that whatever well of creativity that was tapped during the production of Good News ran dry when the band set out to record We Were Dead?

Arcade Fire’s Neon Bible

Until the release of their new CD, Neon Bible, I was never a huge Arcade Fire fan. When my iTunes was set to ‘Shuffle’, and one of its songs came on, I didn’t skip over it, but I never used to make the conscious decision to listen to it. The only reason I even obtained a copy of Neon Bible is that my roommate has always been a much bigger fan than I am, and she bugged me for weeks to give Neon Bible a try.

I was hooked by the time the second track was over. My iPod has been constantly looping Neon Bible for the past week, and I’m still finding new things to love. According to the band’s Myspace site, Neon Bible boasts the use of a pipe organ, a Hurdy Gurdy, a military choir, and a Hungarian orchestra.

The eclectic nature of the composition of the tracks reflects the eclectic nature of the composition of the band itself. Arcade Fire is comprised of seven members who came together over a period of time from various backgrounds, and somehow managed to congeal themselves into a band with one comprehensive sound. (Click here for a link to a very artfully written biography of the band by Alex Neal–definitely more entertaining than any bio I would try to recreate.)

I spent some time reading reviews written by other people for this post. The general consensus seems to that Neon Bible doesn’t quite live up to the high standards set by Funeral (their first album) or even The Arcade Fire EP. (Click here for the Rolling Stone review–it does a good job of summing up the majority of the complaints lodged against Neon Bible.) I’ll even admit that the critics raise a few good points. After reading over and over again that the reverb was excessive, I’ve started to notice that some of the lyrics and melodies would be a lot cleaner without it. But even though I have to (grudgingly) admit that Neon Bible is not the perfect album, I can’t say that that admission really affects my love for it.

My roommate (the die-hard Arcade Fire fan I mentioned before) said this about the new album: “It’s kind of gloomy and overdone, I guess, but who cares, if it’s the kind of CD that makes people want to listen to it over and over again?” As far as Neon Bible is concerned, I’m in complete agreement with her. There are a lot of albums that may be catchy or fun to listen to, but their flaws outweigh their benefits. No so for Neon Bible. There are definitely problems with the album, but the end result is a beautiful, gothic album that I can’t force myself to stop listening to.