As I hadn't written a blog in a while (I am however working on a list of Ken Pratt quotes) I thought I'd post my review I wrote for a guest lecturer. I don't think it's the best I could've done, but it was requested to be posted and here it be.

My Chemical Romance : Danger Days, The True Lives Of The Fabulous Killjoys

My Chemical Romance : eyeliner clad posterboys for the “emo” generation, purveryors of morbid, angsty punk for broken-hearted teenagers. Their last album, the multi-million selling ‘The Black Parade’ was a dark, operatic concept album about “The Patient” and his slow, painful acceptance of his inevitable death. So when frontman Gerard Way, halfway through lead single and album opener Na Na Na (Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na), spits “Let me tell you ‘bout the sad man?/Shut up and let me see your jazz hands!” to say it comes as a surprise is a bit like saying Paul Gascoigne enjoys a pint now and then.

Way and co have never been ones for understatement, and in this respect Danger Days is no different. The concept element present on their three previous efforts (the vampire tale of I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love and Three Cheers For Sweet Rvcenge followed by the mortality story of 2006’s The Black Parade) returns, and this time it is, if anything, more over-the-top. We find ourselves in California in the year 2019, with “The Fabulous Killjoys” : Party Poison (Gerard Way), Jet Star (Ray Toro), Fun Ghoul (Frank Iero) and Kobra Kid (Mikey Way). These comic book style alter-egos of the band are outlaws fighting against the might of the evil Better Living Industries, with its sinister leader Korse, all the while narrated by pirate radio DJ “Dr Death Defying”. It’s basically Nineteen-Eighty-Four with pink hair.

The concept, frankly, doesn’t hold together but in terms of the music? Wow. Iggy Pop style guitar riffs, Bowie-esque synth hooks, Green Day-like singalong pop-punk. It’s not revolutionary in sound but good God it is fun. From the ecstatic shout-along of Na Na Na (Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na) to the slowly building Americana twang of Bulletproof Heart to the subtle, eerie S/C/A/R/E/C/R/O/W this album is about as far from the morbid bombast of The Black Parade as it could possibly be. It’s not perfect, there are moments of regression (God-awful second single Sing for example), but even they can be forgiven when the glam tinged synth-pop of Planetary (Go!) explodes from the speakers, in the words of Dr Death Defying : “Louder than God’s revolver and twice as shiny!”. By the time we get to penultimate track (excluding another interlude from our old friend Dr Death Defying), the utterly fantastic The Kids From Yesterday, it almost feels as though we NEED some of the empty-sounding rhetoric which was all too prevalent on previous MCR albums. And that’s exactly what the Killjoys deliver, though this time it doesn’t sound so empty : “You only hear the music when your heart begins to break” screams Way, surely inspiring thousands of MCRmy tattoos in the process. When the frantic assault of Vampire Money arrives to close the album, you’re left feeling almost breathless.

So what are we left with? From the sounds of it the album My Chemical Romance have always wanted to make. Instead of pandering to their huge existing audience by repeating the successful formula of their first 3 albums, they’ve succeeded in creating a fantastically eclectic pop-rock album which should be riding high in the charts long into next year… And yet. One can’t help but feel that the band, like fellow emo heroes Panic! At The Disco before them, have committed career suicide simply by making a radically different album from the one they;d be expected to make. So divisive were their previous albums, those who weren’t chemically romanced before are unlikely to even listen to this. And those angsty teens? Well “3-2-1, we came to fuck” is hardly “reeling from decimated dreams” is it? Tragically this album seems destined to be largely ignored by the music buying public, simply because of who made it. Even more tragically, those people who ignore it will be missing out on one of the best albums of the year. Don’t let yourself be one of them.