The color scheme is important. My Chemical Romance is a band that thinks carefully about presentation and theatrics; disregard the platinum discs and the thousands of screaming fans, and it's easy to see them as the ambitious Belleville art students that they once were. When the band last played its home state -- four long years ago -- Way dressed in leather-jacket black and bone white. He was pushing "The Black Parade," the band's immensely popular third disc. Like Lady Gaga, the baby-faced Way understands the power of monsters: he was trying to look like a skeleton. Before that, he'd dressed as a vampiric version of Alex DeLarge from "A Clockwork Orange."
But Way doesn't want to examine death anymore; he wants to be ablaze with defiance. Always combative, he and his bandmates -- bassist and little brother Mikey Way, rhythm guitarist and foil Frank Iero, lead guitarist and stuntman Ray Toro and hired-gun drummer Michael Pedicone -- have redirected their energies. These days, they're swinging their fists on behalf of life.
Saturday's show was the first of two sold-out gigs at the Sayreville nightclub for My Chemical Romance. The musicians treated it like a homecoming; so did listeners, who started chanting and cheering for the band long before it took the stage and never really stopped. They were rewarded with a first-rate set: a distinctive, reliably thrilling amalgam of glam rock, new wave, mall punk, pop metal and overdriven Broadway show tunes. It's the band's signature style, and when MCR is clicking, it is a sustained sugar rush worthy of Six Flags.
"The Black Parade" was a meditation on anxiety, war, death, eternity and the afterlife. The concept animating "Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys," the band's poppier new album, seems frivolous by comparison. The members of My Chemical Romance cast themselves as futuristic superheroes battling a repressive regime on the lawless outskirts of a post-apocalyptic desert city. Superficially, this felt more like cartoonish Gorillaz than profound Pink Floyd, especially since the narrative fails to cohere.
But upon close inspection, the real concerns of the album emerge. Way is confronting the perils faced by all aging rebels. The "danger" he faces is the cooling of his own revolutionary ardor. His radioactive wasteland is a metaphor for deadening adulthood, and his constant rallying cries to the boys and girls are pleas to old allies vanishing in the rear-view mirror. How can a writer who always has championed the belligerent, nonconformist adolescent handle the tough transition to his 30s?
Way, to his credit, won't wave the white flag. He has decided instead to redouble his efforts on behalf of his own renegade youth. In concert, he attacks his material with the urgency of a man who realizes that he is running out of time, and to see him sing the "Danger Days" songs is to understand how personal this battle is for him: his lyrics are demands for velocity and resistance.
"I'd rather go to hell than be in purgatory," he hollered during "Na Na Na (Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na);" he'd rather burn, eternally, than get stuck somewhere in between. On the synthesizer spaz-out "Planetary (Go!)," he warned us that there was no vacancy in the emergency room; he cranked up the afterburners anyway. "Destroya," the heaviest song from the album, was given a manic, relentless reading. "They don't believe in us," shrieked Way, "but I believe we're the enemy." He doesn't want to grow up and make peace with the establishment. He's here to contaminate it.
The material from "Black Parade" and its goth-punk predecessor "Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge" hasn't dulled at all; if anything, the four-year layoff has given us time to recognize how sturdy the band's writing has always been. "I''m Not Okay (I Promise)" has sometimes been dismissed as an adolescent's bratty complaint, and of course it is, but if you've got any memory at all of what it's like to be young and easily dismissed, it's not hard to identify with Way's frustration. Some tales of lives spiraling out of control are musically self-indulgent; Way always makes sure to give us an irresistible chorus to hum on the trip down. Now that the shock of impact has faded a bit from these songs, we can better appreciate the structural details: the tricky chromatic run of notes in the anthemic "Teenagers," for instance, and the clever dramatic pacing -- worthy of Brecht and Weill, honestly -- of "Mama." What other modern rock band could effortlessly fold a modulation into a singalong chorus, as MCR does on "Welcome to the Black Parade"?
Thursday, too, is an ambitious Jersey band; one more interested in sonic exploration and sheer aural assault than catchy choruses or album sales. With "No Devolución," the band's latest album, the New Brunswick combo has become a full-on art-rock act, complete with lengthy, multipart songs and portentous imagery. (In "Turnpike Divides," singer Geoff Rickly, who worked with MCR on that band's first album, likens the buildings along the highway to "coffins filled with stars.")
The band's short support set on Saturday consisted mostly of material from "No Devolución," including a pounding take on single "Magnets Caught in a Metal Heart." On these songs, which echo the Cure, My Bloody Valentine and especially late-’80s Killing Joke, Rickly rode a mudslide of bottom-end sludge: throbbing, near-industrial bass and frantic kick drum. He is able to leap from a tuneful caterwaul reminiscent of the Cure's Robert Smith to a hellacious scream that would put a metalhead to shame. This keeps listeners on their toes. Thursday's songs are like dangerous dormant volcanoes. No matter how placid they seem, they're always about to blow.
CREDIT: nj.com
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