Rock Sound — Dec 2006 — No. 91MY CHEMICAL ROMANCESONGS FOR THE DEATH!Contents (Page 3):M
Rock Sound — Dec 2006 — No. 91MY CHEMICAL ROMANCESONGS FOR THE DEATH!Contents (Page 3):Main Features:34. Killswitch Engage42. Evanescence48. My Chemical Romance56. New Found Glory64. (+44)80. IncubusMy Chemical RomanceTHE RELENTLESS MARCH (Page 49):Having just unleashed almost certainly the most hotly anticipated album of the year, My Chemical Romance are showing more drive and ambition than ever. Onwards and upwards, the march of The Black Parade cannot be halted…Words: Victoria Durham / Photos: Steve BrownIt’s been a long time since rock music encountered a band as ambitious as My Chemical Romance and their latest album is no exception. Whether they’re hailing it as the record they want to be remembered for or comparing it to Pink Floyd’s legendary rock opera ‘The Wall’, the New Jersey quintet fully intend ‘The Black Parade’ to be their magnum opus. Sitting in a west London hotel room drinking his second Starbucks of the hour, frontman Gerard Way explains why announcing their third album as their defining one is wise rather than foolish.“The best risk you can take as a band is to make a record like this and paint yourself into a corner,” he begins, “because then you have to get out of it somehow. It’s like putting yourself in a straitjacket like Houdini and figuring out how you’re going to escape. This record is very much a straitjacket in that regard. For our next trick, we’re gonna have to escape it.”It’s just the response you’d expect from a band who are constantly striving to outdo themselves, and ‘The Black Parade’ finds My Chemical Romance raising the bar in many ways. Firstly, there’s the music, and an approach that updates their anthemic punk-pop with the use of brash Broadway choruses, multi-part epics and guitar solos lovingly ripped from Queen.Gerard explains: “When we put together the song ‘Momma’ things really changed. We realized we had raised the creative bar for ourselves and that certain songs we had in a list of 15 had to be cut because they just weren’t working. We ended up cutting about nine songs because they weren’t doing anything new. So everything at that point was scaled against ‘Momma’ as far as risks it took or how fresh it sounded. We didn’t want to grow to feel we could have done more with these songs.”Secondly, there’s the concept. As Gerard notes, My Chemical Romance’s major label debut ‘Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge’ was “usually about aggression, angst or violence”, as it followed one man’s mission to collect the corpses of a thousand evil men. While ‘The Black Parade’ also deals with death, it’s a far more positive experience. The album finally captures the message and spirit that MCR have been trying to communicate all along as Gerard details.“We came up with the concept of this patient in a hospital dying. I like to think that when you die, death comes for you in whatever form you want it to. A strong memory for the patient is his father taking him to see a parade when he was a boy, so that’s how death comes to him, as The Black Parade. We start to tell the story from that. The character is looking back over his life and there’s some very personal stuff. It’s really an examination of mortality and our mortality as a band.”The journey concludes with ‘Famous Last Words’, also the album’s “salvation moment” with the lines: “I am not afraid to keep on living / I am not afraid to walk this world alone”.“It’s the kind of thing we’ve always wanted to say to our fans but have only said between songs,” says Gerard. “Now we’ve found that a song that was really saving us mentally would also be saving them.”Next come the visuals. My Chemical Romance are becoming renowned for grandiose stage sets, elaborate costumes, and a constantly changing image. They like to keep people guessing and, more importantly, they aim to make each album an all-encompassing experience rather than a mere collection of songs. On ‘Three Cheers…’ that meant donning bullet-proof vests to reflect their “street gang” mentality or re-enacting the ‘Helena’ video live on stage with a Busby Berkeley-style dance troupe. This time they’ve taken it one step further with the creation of their very own alter ego, The Black Parade.“We’ve all been fans of similar records like ‘The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars’,” says bassist Mikey Way. “You dream of being able to do something like that one day.”“A lot of influence was taken from bands like Queen, Pink Floyd, and even Iron Maiden in terms of (the scale of) their live show,” adds guitarist Ray Toro. “It’s something we definitely want to bring back to music. It’s more value for the kids and it’s more entertaining.”My Chemical Romance have already begun to hint at who The Black Parade are. In August, at their first UK shows since headlining Give It A Name festival, they unveiled a new logo, updated hairstyles, and gold-trimmed military jackets that hinted at a far bigger picture. More recently, fans will have seen The Black Parade in action during the video for first single ‘Welcome To The Black Parade’. For now, though, the band are keeping the full details under wraps and plan to unleash The Black Parade fully next year, “once people have digested the new songs”.Says Gerard: “There’s already so much planned as far as the stage show. It’s very set in stone. The attention to detail was very much inspired by Pink Floyd’s ‘The Wall’. Full production is the ultimate goal of this record.”And while Gerard won’t give too much away, he does admit that theatricality is the buzzword for the album, with costumes made by none other than long-time Tim Burton collaborator, Colleen Atwood. “It’s more important to change your sound than your cosmetics,” says Gerard. “If you shoot very far with the music then the visuals come out of that. Becoming and designing The Black Parade was very easy. For some reason I kept seeping these guys as a band from Berlin that play in an underground cabaret club. I saw them wearing these Sgt. Pepper death rock uniforms. The parade that meets the dying patient is what he saw as a kid, only instead of Macy’s Day Parade floats, it’s all black confetti and disjointed balloons and people in skeleton masks. We had to take the theatricality to the next level.”THE GHOST OF YOUThough ‘The Black Parade’ is without doubt the album My Chemical Romance are most proud of, it was the most difficult to make, and not because of any stereotypical third album pressures. Instead, the band famed for their gothic image and blood-splattered photoshoots found their morbid fascinations finally caught up with them in a very real way.Earlier this year, they went to live and write in LA’s Paramour Studios. The mansion is popular with bands because of its remote Silver Lake location that allows them to concentrate on making music without distractions. Indeed, that left such a lasting impression on Papa Roach that they named their new album ‘The Paramour Sessions’. But while Jacoby Shaddix and co have said the Paramour is the best thing that ever happened to their music, the eerie atmosphere also tested their limits in a more sinister way - causing tears, tensions, fights and sleepless nights. It’s a bittersweet combination with which My Chemical Romance are all too familiar.“I was especially scared of my room,” recalls Mikey. “I don’t know what colour the walls were because there was never any light in there, but it had this one blue light bulb which just made the room glow. I ran into a dude from Papa Roach and he was like, ‘Who’s in the room with the blue light?’ so I told him I was. He had a story about it but he wouldn’t tell me anything. He just said he’d written something on the wall and I should read it. But when I looked there was nothing there.”Dig a little deeper and you’ll find the Paramour has a suitably spooky past. The mansion has been a school for girls, a convent for Franciscan nuns, and was used mostly recently as a location for Rock Star: Supernova, Halloween H20 and Scream 3. Back in the 1920s, oil heiress Daisy Canfield Danziger owned the Paramour with her filmstar husband Antonio Moreno. It was the scene of lavish socialite gatherings until, on the way home form a party one night, Canfield’s car veered off a Mulholland Drive cliff.“The lady who died there is meant to be buried in the backyard,” says wide-eyed drummer Bob Bryar.“Every day you’d wake up and get scared because you wouldn’t know where you were,” adds Mikey. “I was so scared that I would sneak into Gerard’s room and sleep on the floor.”Gerard continues: “The house was very consuming. It cut you off from the rest of the world because nobody wanted to come up to the hills. You couldn’t get food delivered, there was no mobile phone service and there weren’t even any phones. It was like some bizarre reality show where you take a bunch of people and put them in this freezing haunted house. I think it was very conductive to what we did musically but it opened up a lot of stuff for people as far as depression. It hit us all. Then somebody needed to get out of the house to get help. We were paralysed because it was the first time we tried to write anything not being together as a unit. We weren’t sure what we were going to do and we were actually pretty terrified because the clock was ticking.”When My Chemical Romance weren’t witnessing doors slam, watching taps turn on and off on their own, or hearing strange girls’ voices, they were writing the darkest songs on the album and of their career.“It was scary living there but the music that came out of it was a huge benefit,” says Ray.“Sometimes it almost felt like we were haunting the house,” says Gerard. “Other people go there because it’s cool and haunted and they can have parties. We don’t party, so it was just us. It was a very isolated, scary feeling to be like ghosts in this place with no purpose, aimlessly wandering around. Some people wouldn’t even come out of their rooms. But at a certain point it felt like it was the only thing there for us, the only company we had.”Adds guitarist Frank Iero: “We went into writing the record thinking we were the tightest we could be as friends but coming out of it we were even tighter. The thing that poisoned us kind of gave us life.”That said, even hardened horror fans like My Chemical Romance could take only so much. After two months they relocated to the sunnier, warmer and far less scary Oakwood apartment complex.“The music became fucking bleak,” says Gerard. “We needed some kind of redemption or salvation, we needed a song to move the record on, and ‘Famous Last Words’ made us feel that way. We got it and we felt complete and that’s when we said, ‘Let’s get out of this house’.”WHO WANTS TO LIVE FOREVER?Asked why My Chemical Romance remain so preoccupied with death on ‘The Black Parade’, Gerard responds: “Accepting my grandma’s death was what made it okay for me to write about death so much and find beauty in the finality of it again. I got through it and Mikey got through it. There’s only one line for her on this record and that’s, ‘Sometimes I get the feeling she’s watching over me’ in ‘Welcome To The Black Parade’. This record is about the world, how we face it, and how our fans face it. That’s part of the point of the record, getting through stuff.”The Way brothers have never hesitated to talk about how their grandmother, Elena Lee Rush, was hugely influential on them as people and musicians. Understandably, her death dominated the last album, both in songs like ‘Helena’ and promotional interviews in which they discussed the difficulty of her passing. Yet facing up to mortality has had an equally big influence on My Chemical Romance’s recent work. In many ways, ‘The Black Parade’ is the flipside of ‘Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge’. Where the earlier album centres on a character that tries to deny death by making a pact with the devil to win immortality, the new album is a warts-and-all account of a terminally ill patient’s final days. In places, this new-found acceptance of death has promoted the band to make the most of their opportunity and go all-out with the theatrics. But in others, it’s uncovered in a realism in their songwriting that makes for uncomfortable listening. ‘Cancer’ is a brutally frank song delivered straight from the hospital bed, and will undoubtedly hit home with anybody who’s lost someone close to them.“That’s the intent of the song,” reflects Gerard. “The whole record is really about truth and that song doesn’t pull any punches. It’s called ‘Cancer’ for a reason. We could easily have called it something like ‘The Hardest Part’ and people would still make the connection that it’s about cancer. But we felt like it needed to be brutally upfront and in your face because that’s what disease is like.”Following the tradition of bleakly honest songs like Nine Inch Nails’ ‘Hurt’, ‘Cancer’ strips back the music to leave bare vocals, piano, and lyrics that articulate what most of us are too afraid or too polite to say.“Some of the greatest songs are the songs that are most honest, so honest that it scares you or it’s hard to listen to. That’s why this song had to be on the record,” says Gerard, who even chopped off his hair in order to identify with the album’s main character, “the patient”. In fact, so powerful is ‘Cancer’ that most of the band confess to it being their favourite song.“I think it’s probably my favourite song we’ve ever done,” emphasises Frank. “It’s hard for me to listen to it without getting emotional, but in being so brutally honest there’s a real simple beauty to it.”Mikey agrees: “It’s heart-wrenching. I don’t know anyone who can listen to it and not be affected in some way.”“At first I questioned whether it was right to put it on the record,” adds Ray. “Then someone close to me who’d had a member of the family die of cancer told me it could actually help people through it and deal with the loss. That made it okay for me. Now I can see how it would definitely help people through hard times.”TALK TO FRANK (OR GERARD, OR RAY…)That, of course, brings us to something else My Chemical Romance are exceptionally good at: providing inspiration and guidance to their many dedicated fans. The recent Daily Mail article that cited My Chemical Romance as the ring-leaders of an evil “emo cult” that celebrates self-harm would have been laugh-out-loud funny, had it not been so insultingly ignorant of rock culture and the band itself. If the article’s author Sarah Sands failed to comprehend the sense of belonging, purpose and empowerment to be gained from rock music, whatever the genre, then she made her biggest mistake in painting My Chemical Romance as perpetrators. More than any other band in rock right now, they provide a lifeline to their followers. When they aren’t delivering messages of strength and encouragement on stage (including the assertion that suicide is “a bullshit way out”), they’re meeting fans after gigs, listening to their problems, and advising them to get help. It probably never occurred to people like Sarah Sands that, while undoubtedly in a position to shape young minds, Gerard Way might use that power to guide kids back from the edge, rather than push them over it.“Kids are still telling us their problems in much the same way but I think we’ve grown to learn how to deal with it a lot better,” says Gerard. “We just thank them for sharing, tell them to really hang in there and say we’ll keep making music for as long as we can. But we always tell them to find someone to talk to. That’s important. It’s what we always encourage these kids to do when they tell us their deepest, darkest regrets or fears.”Adds Ray: “If the music helps people get through things, live their lives as best as they can and be good people, then that’s what this is all about.”The band’s unique insight into teen culture has even found its way on to the album in ‘Teenagers’, a raucous rock song more suited to The Offspring but with a serious message at its core. Behind the tongue-in-cheek lyrics, Gerard shows an understanding of the problems faced by today’s youth that politicians would do well to note.“The song examines how kids these days are engendered to violence and feel that the only way they can solve their problems is with violence,” he says. “They’re so watched-over and so controlled. There’s intense pressure on teens and sometimes these kids lash out because they don’t fit in. It’s something we’re very aware of and we wanted to make a statement about it. It’s also a very direct statement about Columbine and kids killing kids, which is an epidemic in America.”So what of the future? Disregarding sensationalist tabloid articles and the hostile bottling they received at Reading Festival, My Chemical Romance’s honeymoon period as the golden boys of rock is due to expire. But for a band of their character, that just presents a bigger, more exciting challenge. Rest assured that armed with a record as spectacularly ambitious as ‘The Black Parade’, it’s going to be one hell of a ride.The album ‘The Black Parade’ is out now on Reprise. Catch My Chemical Romance on their November UK tour; see gig guide for dates.www.mychemicalromance.com -- source link