My Chemical Romance's The Black Parade Marches into Stores

Newly blond vocalist Gerard Way opens the new album with the song "The End.", and odd song to start off an album. The first line of "The End." begins with the simple words, "Now come one, come all to this tragic affair," which just might be the perfect invitation. The CD, the band's third, is a little tragic, but in with that tragedy is a raging sense of accomplishment, and some completely awesome music.

My Chemical Romance flew onto the rock/emo scene in 2003 when their sophomore album, Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge, soared the charts. Now the darkly clad quintet has returned, with not just a new album but a new theme, a new look, and a new look on life.

The theme of this new album, entitled "The Black Parade" is death and dying, but not in your usual generic goth-esque type way. My Chemical Romance has donned a character, a young man known only as "the patient" who is dying. As he dies he remembers a parade his father took him to once when he was younger and he realizes that, when we die, death comes for us however we want it to. For his death, he chooses to be whisked away into the great hereafter by this Black Parade, who are, ostensibly, who the band has fashioned themselves as.

The first track on the album, less than two minutes long, is an introduction. It's introducing the uniqueness of the album, where the birth of the music is entrenched in the aspect of death. The second song, entitled, "Dead!" is a very catchy ditty in which Gerard Way croons "did you hear the news that you're dead?" This song too is part of the introductory phase of the album in which "the patient" is dying. The third song, "This is How I Disappear" seems to be less catchy and comedic and more serious. It is here we feel that the patient is dying.