Mama –

The Five of Us Are Dying (Rough Mix) –

All The Angels (Live Demo) –

HA!! And you used to roll your eyes when I said I had a very eclectic taste in music! Well here’s something different for sure >:D

Also…FAIR WARNING!! This album contains explicit lyrics (specifically “Mama” from these three songs).

The Black Parade/Living with Ghosts, (2016) Also referred to as the 10th Anniversary of The Black Parade, by the late My Chemical Romance. While no one from the band is exactly “dead,” the band did officially disband back in 2013.

My Chemical Romance is probably one of the best definitions of an “Emo rock band” (even though Gerard Way, their lead singer, despises the term. Opting for “violent dangerous pop”), but they are ultimately grouped in the huge realm of “alternative rock.” Finishing off their career with a short list of four studio albums (five if you consider Conventional Weapons, which was just a compilation of a series of five previously-released singles) and two live albums may not seem like much at first glance, but I would argue their is something to their rough little run. While their first two albums are solid examples of alt and punk rock, their final two really seal their contribution to the music scene in my opinion. These two (The Black Parade and Danger Days) are concept albums that branch out to draw inspiration from an impressively large selection of genres while amazingly staying true to the sound the band developed in their first two albums.

This brings us to The Black Parade/Living with Ghosts the album that was released to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the The Black Parade. It is a 3 LP album that includes the entirety of The Black Parade as well as 11 previously unreleased demos and outtakes. My Chemical Romance has admitted to often writing way more songs than actually appear on their albums with both The Black Parade and Danger Days having over 30 songs written for each and with a final cut of roughly half that number for both records. The Black Parade‘s concept centers around a individual known simply as the “Patient” who is dying from cancer. The album fitting begins with his ending or death and then goes on to record his experiences after death and recount major events from his life. Imagine the classical “life flashed before my eyes” scenario. Gerard Way explained that his idea that death comes to a person as their fondest memory (in this case a parade from the Patient’s childhood) drove the concept of the “Black Parade.”

So I kinda broke my “two-song rule” once again this time around… ^^;
My ultimate reasoning was that I wanted to have one song from the original album, a demo song, and a song outtake. What I ended up with were these three. “Mama” is from the original album and features a soldier writing home to his disappointed mother of his terrible deeds in war. I really enjoy the midway point of the second verse and changes time signature and melody to match that of Pink Floyd’s song “The Trial” (from The Wall), which also had some very strong war imagery. “The Five of Us Are Dying” is an early rough mix of a song that would later be titled “Welcome to the Black Parade” (easily one of their most successful songs ever) and it provides an interesting look into how the song developed. “All The Angels” is one of the many songs that was left on the chopping block and never made it past a demo version, and while it clearly feels less refined (like demos tend to be) it’s still probably one of my favorite from all the demos and outtakes 😀

My Chemical Romance serves as a fairly decent example of a more recent band that is always a reminder to me personally to never overlook the music of my generation. Because I wasn’t interested in this band till I heard their “greatest hits” album May Death Never Stop You after they had already quit I only get to hear their music in retrospect and wish they were still around like any of my other 60s and 70s bands. Maybe the musical style of the 60s and 70s appeals to me the most, but if I stay too stuck and rooted in the past I can’t properly appreciate the music of today. But maybe I’m just rambling now…

I’ll end this slightly-longer-than-normal entry in LP Mondays with this quote from My Chemical Romance’s guitarist about their vision for The Black Parade that I think is an accurate statement as to what they accomplished with this album…

“The intention was to make something that was classic, something timeless. Something that 20 or 30 years from now, parents could play for their kids and say, ‘This is what I was listening to when I was your age. Check it out, it’s still f**king cool.’ We wanted to make a record you could pass down. There’s a lot of music out now that doesn’t feel like that.”