ARTICLE: Spin Magazine - 10 Essential MCR Songs

#1 - “Helena (So Long & Goodnight)”

 The band's first Top 40 hit and finest moment could be considered a ballad, but the blistering 256 BPM verses provide the explosive contrast to the stately chorus that keep it from being a sleepy crossover hit. The surreal, stirring video, in which a corpse leaps out of the coffin for one last dance, also marked My Chemical Romance as mainstream rock’s most ambitious practitioners of the music video since the heyday of the Smashing Pumpkins.

#2 - "Vampire Money

When My Chemical Romance started, they were the weird goth kids in the corner lunch table, writing songs about vampires. By the time they made their final album, 2010's Danger Days, vamps had gone mainstream, and they capped the record with a hilarious kiss-off to all the bands who cashed in on those Twilight soundtracks: "hair back, collar up, jet black, so cool / sing it like the kids that are mean to you." Once again, the band back up their rock nerd bona fides on the intro, as Gerard and the boys engage in a little opening banter in homage to the Sweet's "Ballroom Blitz."

#3 - “Skylines and Turnstiles”
The very first My Chemical Romance song is the one Gerard Way wrote after watching the towers fall on 9/11, and it remains a raw, disturbing lyric, the comic book artist's visual sensibility coming out in graphic descriptions of "steel corpses" and a "broken city sky."

#4 - "Welcome to the Black Parade"
 
Theatrical, multi-part rock epics rarely cracked the top 10 of the Hot 100 even back in the '70s, when such songs were actually a major force in popular music, so it's even remarkable that My Chemical Romance managed to peak at No. 9 on the charts with such a long, gutsy song.

#5 - "Kill All Your Friends"

My Chemical Romance only released four albums in their dozen years of existence, and they might've been more productive if they'd actually used all the songs they wrote. Instead, potent tracks like "Kill All Your Friends" were left off of The Black Parade entirely, relegated to B-side status.

#6 - "You Know What They Do to Guys Like Us in Prison"

One of the many things My Chemical Romance had in spades that most of their contemporaries lacked was swing; tracks like "You Know What They Do To Guys Likehttp://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=1046921453374029580#editor/target=post;postID=4623635932766833968 Us" or "House of Wolves" swaggered with the menace that only a confident, flexible rhythm section can pull off.

#7 - "Teenagers"

My Chemical Romance had a great sense of album cohesion, but they also knew when to break it up; "Teenagers" wouldn't have been at all out of place on the giddy, bleak Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge. But as the barbed, sarcastic aside toward the end of the dramatic, inspirational The Black Parade, it stuck out beautifully.

#8 - "Na Na Na (Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na)"

If the first three Na's don't get you, the last nine parenthetical ones will. Kiss me, you animal!

#9 - "Dead!"

Sometimes My Chemical Romance put all their influences in a blender, and sometimes they just played ELO's "Mr. Blue Sky" with a Big Muff pedal. Either approach has its merits.

#10 - "I'm Not Okay (I Promise)

The faux trailer video for "I'm Not Okay" that first landed My Chemical Romance in Viacom rotation may look like the most entertaining high school movie of the last two decades compressed into three-and-a-half minutes, but the greater accomplishment is the song, which is itself the most rousing pop-punk breakthrough of proudly maladjusted angst since Green Day's "Basket Case."

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