Flamboyant: marked by or given to strikingly elaborate or colourful display or behaviour.

Dramatic: striking in appearance or effect.

Passionate: capable of, affected by, or expressing intense feeling.

All of the above and much more, is what you can expect from a band like My Chemical Romance. Faithful to their name the New Jersey quintet is able to excite fiery passions and indelible love stories.  It's all in something that few bands seem to possess right now: a heart.  And the heart in their new record : The Black Parade, is a pulsing, bloody, gory, beautiful thing that beats and careens against battered ribs, that clenches and stops and restarts, Lazarus in everybody’s chest.

This is a record of life drenched in death. This record is a tale about the eternal dichotomy between love and death.  This is a record of monsters and dreams, nightmares and salvation.

This record is a soul itself.

Whatever the press and fans were expecting when MCR announced that they were writing the follow up to the multi million sellers Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge, they were not expecting this record. They were not expecting to be such a good record. Because, yes, it has to be said, this is not a good record, this is not an amazing record, this is a WONDERFUL, OVER THE TOP, CRAZY, MAGNIFICENT record.

Since the first, understated, melancholic bars and abrasive words of “The end” (in an oxymoronic statement that is typical of the entire album, where dying is living and living is a form of inexorable death) Gerard Way and his band of friends, brothers, misfits, are clearly on a mission, not only to deliver a (practically) flawless record, they are dead set to tell us a story.  To tell us a story that, in their best traditions of classics and masterpieces, will talk not only to this generation, but to the generations to come.

Armed with a varied and complex and weirdly eccentric musical knowledge, My Chemical Romance has delivered a record that is a written testament to the soul, heart, feeling, days, nights, tribulations and triumph of five guys. Yes, Gerard Way is the ring master of this incredible, sometime macabre, but always brilliant circus, but the rest of the band is the back bone of this untamed beast.

The press and some of the fans were expecting tamed, bored tigers and stiff jokes, but, in that defiant way that had dragged these five men out of the crime ridden, hope lacking, grey skyline of their industrial New Jersey, My Chemical Romance has delivered a rock opera that is much more than that.

This is not Queen A night at the Opera and it’s not Pink Floyd’s The Wall, albeit, to Gerard’s own admission, those are some of the influences that have inspired this record.

The Black Parade is a portrait, it’s a chronicled painting of how life and death can rob each other of their own meaning, of how, sloth, disgrace, self loathing can sap the entire soul out of a heart.

The imagery in the record is vivid, brilliant and gory-ish, in the best possible way, this is a graphic novel sang with words of the sharpest diamond razorblades.

Well it rains and it pours when you're out on your own
If I crash on the couch, can I sleep in my clothes
Cause I spent the night dancing, I'm drunk I suppose
If it looks like I'm laughing I'm really just asking to leave
this alone You're in time for the show
You're the one that I need, I'm the one that you loathe
You can watch me corrode like a beast in repose
Cause I love all the poison away with the boys in the band  (The Sharpest Lives)

And it’s easy to see the landscape scratched in sharp graphite’s pencil, the anti heroes and the rain and that’s what makes this experience sometime much, much more than just a record.  You can see it, touch it and live it, because, in many way we are all patients. We are all standing under a rain of graphite’s line.  We are all in search of the theatrical of life.  We are all born with the desire of live and be heroes. We are all, in a way or another disappointed and disappointing.

This is not the Bible, this is not a record to save people (albeit MCR in their ever so earnest way, have often said that many kids had thanked them for saving their lives), this is not a gospel for broken kids, This is not even a record for gothic/emo/screamo/ teenagers (teenagers scare the living shit out of me, sings Gerard in Teenagers), this a record that the guys from My Chemical Romance have written for themselves first and foremost and yes, it is self indulgent and yes, it can be too open, too in your face, too emotional even, but if there is something that this world lacks is sincerity and, even if it’s overblown and majestic and theatrical, this truth? This truth, we really need it.

And after all the blood that you still have,
Another time I was chancing it all around,
So fix your eyes and get up,
Baby, get up,
While you can,

Where’d you go?
And would you even turn to say,
I don’t love you,
Like I did yesterday, (I don’t Love you)

So, is this record a masterpiece?

Yes.

It is.

It’s huge, it’s too big for it’s own sake and too many people will end up owning it, just because it’s gonna be number 1 for months and because there is nothing more marketable than beauty and ingrained ability to be ambiguous and tragic, but this record is a masterpiece because it has no fear. No fear to be too much. No fear to tell the truth. No fear to try and be as beautiful and as ugly as it possibly can.

No fear to die.

Because this? This is forever and My Chemical Romance knows it.

I am not afraid to keep on living
I am not afraid to walk this world alone
Honey if you stay
I'll be forgiven
Nothing you can say can stop me going home (Famous Last Words)

by Laila