Okay, this is bound to be interesting. So I often pick up a few music albums from the Library, the most recent of these pick-ups was the 2006 My Chemical Romance Album The Black Parade.
This album topped both the New Zealand RIANZ ALBUMS Chart and the US Rock Albums Chart and reached Number 2 on the Canadian, UK and Billboard 200, ranked number 10 on the Japanese Albums Chart and reached as low as Number 91 on the Belgian Walloon Albums Chart.
My Chemical Romance is one of those bands I've heard about, but never really listened to until recently. The album has thirteen songs and tells the story of the narrator's experiences in death, the afterlife and in reflecting on his own life, although you wouldn't really pick up on it by the songs themselves.
Most of my problems with the album can be seen in the third track "This is How I Disappear" which does start off promising with a good guitar, albeit a bit of a generic riff. The song isn't bad but the drums really do kind of drown the vocals out, and the song is followed by "The Sharpest Lives" Which has one of the most annoying basslines I've ever heard, seriously, if you aren't annoyed by that bassline you clearly have more tolerance for it than I do. "The Sharpest Lives" also doesn't offer anything distinct to the album, it can really mesh with the previous songs. Thankfully the following track is a pretty good highlight.
"Welcome to the Black Parade" starts off slowly giving a nice change of pace to the album, and even though it does shift into a harder rock song pretty much at random, the chorus isn't bad, it's catchy and somewhat upbeat. The song also did really well reaching number 59 on the Billboard Hot 100 and topping the US Alternative Songs Chart. The next song "I Don't Love You" also isn't bad, but it didn't hit either the American nor Canadian charts, but the song did however reach Number 3 on the Scottish Singles Chart and Number 13 in the UK Singles Chart.
The Ninth and Tenth tracks are kind of low points for the album. The Ninth track "Mama" sounds very similar to Gogol Bordello's "Start Wearing Purple" and the tenth track "Sleep" is just a flat-out bland song even with the strange recording at the beginning. However both of those are forgiven for the eleventh track, "Teenagers".
This is my favourite song on the album, as the band seemed to have ditched the Emo Rock slow and whiny sound for an Alternative Rock fast and hard sound. It was the only song to really stand out first time I heard the whole album.
Overall, I can not say I enjoyed this album as a whole, many songs run together and the instrumentals often drown out the vocals. Although songs like "Welcome to the Black Parade" and "Teenagers" are good songs, the rest of the album is either meh or just plain bad, with my least favourite songs being "The Sharpest Lives" and "Sleep".
Maybe if I was a bigger fan of this kind of rock I would enjoy it more as it does seem to be something only fans of the genre can enjoy, but for now, I think I'll stick with Linkin Park as my go to Whiny rock band.
I give this album a 5/10 for the drowned out vocals and for the meh songs.
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