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No doubt, the tragic events of September 11, 2001, affected each and every American one way or another. Some more acutely than others; some more artistically than most. Take Gerard Way, singer of New Jersey’s goth-punk horror show My Chemical Romance: Prior to 9/11, he was an animation artist peddling his wares to the Cartoon Network. Then a metaphorical bag of hammers descended upon his dome much like you’d think a metaphorical bag of hammers would descend upon one’s dome—hard. Damn hard.
“I had no direction,” he later confided in Spin magazine. “I thought, I need to make a difference in my life, and music was my answer.”
And just like that, My Chemical Romance, the scariest band yet to menace the Garden State’s fine, upstanding populace, was born. Modeling themselves after their most obvious forebears, another pack of Jersey Scary People known as The Misfits, they fused fat, fist-pumping choruses to lickity-split rhythms, hair-metal riffage, horror-movie motifs, and one hell of a sinister sense of humor. Consider their sophomore release, Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge, the follow-up to 2002’s Geoff Rickly-produced I Brought You My Bullets And You Brought Me Your Love: Bearing the tagline “The story of a man, a woman, and the corpses of a thousand evil men . . .” it’s fundamentally a concept album—something to do with a brokenhearted dude rising from the dead, seeking revenge, so on and so forth.
Which is all fine and dandy, but let’s keep the ol’ eye on the ball, shall we? Concepts are nice window dressing, especially those that reflect a honked-up, comic-book-addled imagination. But strip away the eye candy and what have you got? In the case of Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge, a ferocious, endlessly entertaining album, chock-full of emotionally charged singalongs wrapped in Z-grade horror camp. Consider the collection’s centerpiece—the thrash-gone-cabaret double take “You Know What They Do To Guys Like Us In Prison,” stuffed with one of the most memorable choruses in recent memory. Then there’s “I’m Not Okay (I Promise),” a downright evil, arena-ready delight riding Andrew W.K. keyboards, in which Way sneers, “Forget about the dirty looks/The photographs your boyfriend took.”
Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge is a good album. It might even be a great album—particularly for a band that begins each show with the refrain, “Unleash the bats!” Far from relying on gimmickry to sell the goods, My Chemical Romance seems to know that any horror movie worth watching ultimately has to produce a compelling monster—the payoff at the bottom of the popcorn tub. MCR’s monster? Thirteen vicious cuts that while they bleed all over the place with slasher-flick glee, also linger in the emotional center far longer than they have any right to. Now, that’s truly scary.
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