The Fifth Addition: My Chemical Romance

The first My Chemical Romance song that I remember knowing all the lyrics to was of course, “Welcome to the Black Parade.” I have distinct memories of belting that song in the car with my family, but it was not until a few years ago I got my record player for Christmas that I fully listened to the album it came from. The Black Parade was the first record I got on Vinyl.

My Review

My Chemical Romance or MCR, released The Black Parade in 2006 as their third album and by this point, MCR had been labeled as an “emo” band because of their darker musical approach. At the time, the band consisted of lead vocalist Gerard Way, guitarists Ray Toro and Frank Iero, bassist Mikey Way, and Bob Bryar on drums. This album was highly anticipated and seemed to deliver, being called the best album of the year by many punk-rock fans.

The album follows a unique story the band came up with. It begins with a cancer patient who is dying and revisits all the important times in his life— the parades, his childhood, and deaths of his loved ones. It begins with the intro song of the album, “The End.” This song is a short two minutes and begins with the patient in the hospital dying of cancer: “(Save me) get me the hell out of here/ (Save me) too young to die in here.” The slow song leads into a seamless transition into the second track, “Dead!”

In “Dead!”, the patient has learned he has only two weeks left to live and from the tone of the song, is not taking it too well. The sad intro that was “The End” leads led into an upbeat, raging song where you can practically feel the anger of the patient. The short introducing guitar solo lead’s to powerful vocals from Way, driving the song.

Skipping to the fifth track, “Welcome To The Black Parade” was the first single on the album. This was the beginning of the story for the patient while dying. He remembers his father taking him to see a marching band in the city when he was younger. Way stated that he believed that death comes to you in your strongest memory, and in this case it was a marching band. This means that death comes to the patient as the black parade. “Welcome To The Black Parade” is an iconic song, and was also called a “Bohemian Rhapsody” for millennials by Spin. The song became the band’s biggest hit and remains one of my favorites by MCR.

The next very popular song off the album is the 11th track, “Teenagers.” This was a radio-ready track that almost does not fit the album with the simple riffs that gives way for Way to scream his lyrics. Way told NME that the song explores violence in kids. “It’s about a really big problem in America where kids are killing kids. The only thing I learned in high school is that people are very violent and territorial.” In this song, the patient remembers how society made him violent when he was younger. “They’re gonna rip up your heads/ Your aspirations to shreds/ Another cog in the murder machine they said: “All teenagers scare the living sh*t out of me.”

The story ends with the 13th track called “Famous Last Words.” The patient is given hope in the song before, “Disenchanted”, and is finally content with living his life and comes to the conclusion that it is worth it.

The thought out story that MCR created for this album is nothing like I’ve heard before. It requires all the songs on the album to be listened to straight through, which is something that is often not done in recent music. “The Black Parade” continues to be my favorite album by MCR and one of my favorites overall.