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Friday Recommendation – DANGER DAYS: The True Lives Of The Fabulous Killjoys

By | November 26th, 2010
Posted in Columns | % Comments


This is a comic book website. Friday Recommendation is a staple article of the website, and one that I strive to make sure is updated on a weekly basis so that you, the reader, can have something to take with you as the “work week” ends.

However, despite this being a comic website, this is a music recommendation. That might seem a tad screwy at first, but the connections are there – lead singer Gerard Way is an avid comic fan and writer of the book Umbrella Academy, and his brother Mikey also write a Scarecrow short story in a DCU Halloween Anthology. On top of that, Danger Days is slated to become a comic book itself (last I saw it was rumored that Becky Cloonan was doing art?), and Grant Morrison has been an active part of the band’s rather lush music videos.

So with that in mind, if you’re looking for a good new CD to grab and listen to on all those drives you’ll be making this weekend, check behind the cut. This is a good one (and you can trust me on this as well – I have a college degree in audio engineering, so I wouldn’t lie to you).

My Chemical Romance is a band that began with incredibly humble beginnings and, with just one catchy enough pop song, moved into the higher tier of “emo acts” in the past decade. Formerly tied with images closer to the goth and Hot Topic sects of your local mall, the band has been rather widely successful both in the critical aspect and the fan aspect. Their last album, the Black Parade, was a huge success, and the band certainly saw massive acclaim to go along with it (even to the point that my father, a 66 year old man who grew up strictly with classical music and the Beatles, adored the record).

However, the band has been musically absent for the past four years. Supposedly working heavily on an album with a stripped back garage band sound, they have instead turned up with Danger Days, a wildly fun album that absolutely screams for you to pay attention and sing along. And to be perfectly honest, this could be the perfect record for them to put out right now.

A trend I’ve noticed with bands that were popular when I was in high school is excessive regression. Bands that have broken up or gone on hiatus have reunited to play their old songs ad naseum to fans that could care less about their new music, if only because the bands have pretty much worn themselves out. Even the bands that haven’t done so and keep pushing on have been putting out miss after miss in my book, and it’s safe to say that out of every band I ever listened to in high school and my “wild” and “rebellious” years of the teenage wasteland, there are very few that I would ever bother to even pick up a new album of.

My Chemical Romance is not one of those bands. MCR is a band that certainly has a “stigma” in the average community as one of those bands. The type of bands that only a “certain” kind of people can listen to, and that’s simply not true. While the band has certainly been tied to (via the media) some odd teenage emotion-related nonsense, that has not stopped them from hiding in a hole somewhere and crafting an album that fully displays exactly what the band has been creatively capable of since their inception.

So let’s start breaking it down: Danger Days – at it’s bare minimum – is a concept album about a group of post-apocalyptic survivors called the Killjoys, as they travel around the zones of Battery City in California living in a nightmare world controlled by the corporation Better Living Industires (BL/ind). Outlaws and rebels, the group is on the run from the S/C/A/R/E/C/R/O/W unit of BL/ind, which is comprised of exterminators like Korse (played by Grant Morrison) and “draculoids”, unfortunate souls who have been kidnapped and forced into a life of servitude towards the company that seeks to completely dominate the human race. All of this is displayed to us, the listener, courtesy of one Doctor Death Defying (voiced by Steve, Righ?), the last DJ, who informs us of the story periodically throughout the story.

To be honest, the plot is a tad esoteric. From a base listen of the album, one can’t inherently tell the entire tale right off the bat. The story is rather well hidden within the metaphors of the songs, but it can be inferred that nothing ends well. The music videos certainly don’t help, but they make for incredibly impressive companion pieces (and I’m sure the comic will be fantastic as well). However, the story can be felt via the consistent tone of the album. By paying attention to the track titles as well as the major or minor tones of the music, one can actually somewhat hear the story as it evolves rather than be involved in a straight telling of the story. The track “Party Poison,” which comes right after the news that two of the Killjoys have died, acts as a wildly alive call to arms by Gerard Way’s character on the album, who attempts to rally all hands in order to fight against the S/C/A/R/E/C/R/O/Ws. Furthermore, tracks like “DESTROYA” and “The Only Hope For Me Is You” effectively convey the rather darker elements of their story in the same way. “Na Na Na” and “Vampire Money” round out either end of the album as bookends both for opening and closing credits, allowing the listener to enter and exit the record in the same way they came in.

Continued below

What makes it very interesting is that beyond the surface value of the album and it’s concept, each track stands on it’s own as a commentary to the world MCR very clearly finds itself involved with. A very heavy theme of the record is the price of fame and what people will do to get it, from “Na Na Na” straight through to tracks like “Party Poison” and the story closer, “The Kids From Yesterday.” Way writes and sings a lot here about how people have fame they don’t deserve, and looking at it from his perspective as someone who was somewhat of a notorious party hound/drug user, it offers up an interesting look at where Way was with an album like Three Chairs and where he is now. It’s rather impossible to notice how often the songs have deeper meanings that don’t even pretend to be covert, as Way takes his time in laying out his issues with the celebrity of today. Even the idea of the post-apocalyptic wasteland created by corporations attempting to control every inch of our lives isn’t very devoid of the obvious metaphor.

As a band, the group actually doesn’t really evolve beyond their older sounds. While there is a difference between this and the Black Parade (if certainly for more songs simply being in a major key), the band has digressed from a lot of fancy riffs in place for fast paced punk songs that seek more to get you off your feet and moving rather than act as the backdrop to your moodiness. The band doesn’t shy away from having obvious influences showing either, with “Kids From Yesterday” sounding as if it was a Joshua Tree b-side. The album has a very anthemic feel, clearly designed for it’s live performance as one can’t help but imaging in their head the stage show that goes along with the music. The album ostensibly is a set up for Way to rally fans to fist pumps and sing alongs, and the record stands well enough alone simply played rather loud in the car while driving fast down the highway.

Where the music does evolve is in it’s minor intricacies. While the band has always included little elements in songs to help tell stories (such as little sound effects on the Black Parade), the music offers itself up to a lot more concept-based effects and electronic sounds. We have a lot more segues between the music in terms of relatable sounds, and the narration from Doctor Death Defying help to keep this album much more concept based than their other albums, which all featured rather loose concepts as opposed to strict stories. The band also used to rather strictly stay with music that could be easily replicated live, but songs like “The Only Hope For Me Is You” and “Planetary (GO!)” feature rather heavy electronic elements that stay through the entire album (such as the introduction to “DESTROYA”). While overall there is a drop in the amount of showmanship of the musical side (the lack of solos or guitar work by Ray is noticeable), the album’s songs as a whole work well together more so than the previous record’s songs worked separated.

My Chemical Romance has always been infused with an excess amount of creativity with Gerard Way. Way is a big ol’ nerd like the rest of us, though he admittedly hides it better. The Umbrella Academy has been rather uniformly great, and the elaborate costumes he designs for the band have always had a huge play into why the band is so successful. Working with the other members, Way and company have with them a powerhouse of creative musicianship that has not been let this loose ever. I always felt like their previous work somewhat pandered to expectations, but Danger Days fully moves away from that goth/emo persona that had been their stereotype for so long and instead allows the band to be a brand new entity. This isn’t the same My Chemical Romance that put out the Black Parade. This is a new band entirely, and with that comes a new attitude, a new look, and something brand new to get into. The accompanying videos that tie-in with the album (which can be found at the band’s YouTube page) allow for such a rich mythos to exist alongside a 15 record album, with only 10 of those songs truly featuring story to them. It’s that kind of entertainment factor and spectacle that truly sets MCR apart from a lot of acts of this caliber, and certainly allows them to move away from the given stereotypes that plague the band’s existence.

To put it simply – Danger Days is an excessively fun record. It’s very hard to put on the CD and not have a grand time listening to it, especially in the car and especially at a large volume. The band’s days of overtly trying to impress everyone is gone, and this is an album that feels like they sat back and had a lot of fun working on the story surrounding the songs, and the songs that comprise the story. Simply by listening to the record, you get the inherent feeling that this is the record the band has been waiting to make, and it is most certainly the record that the band has needed to make to truly distinguish themselves beyond a one-note act. If you’re allowing yourself to miss out on this record, you’re simply letting yourself miss out on 53 minute and 56 second action packed adventure of fast cars, laser guns, and all the fun and joy that the post-apocalyptic wasteland brings us. From the first tuning of the radio station to the final drone of the National Anthem and crashes of the band’s last punk-tribute song ending, this album is the absolute core musical fun that we, as “well educated” and certainly diverse musical scholars with libraries of songs and albums at our fingertips, need to close out this year in music.


//TAGS | Friday Recommendation

Matthew Meylikhov

Once upon a time, Matthew Meylikhov became the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Multiversity Comics, where he was known for his beard and fondness for cats. Then he became only one of those things. Now, if you listen really carefully at night, you may still hear from whispers on the wind a faint voice saying, "X-Men Origins: Wolverine is not as bad as everyone says it issss."

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