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When My Chemical Romance pronounced that "I'm Not OK (I Promise)" on its 2004 sophomore album Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge, the New Jersey group made a pact of pain with the headbanging wing of the emo rock crowd that insures rapt... Read More

When My Chemical Romance pronounced that "I'm Not OK (I Promise)" on its 2004 sophomore album Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge, the New Jersey group made a pact of pain with the headbanging wing of the emo rock crowd that insures rapt devotion from those who like to hear a heart torn apart to a the surging sounds of hard rock.

The group's angst comes primarily from frontman Gerard Way, a former animator who was moved to start the band after he witnessed the World Trade Center collapse on 9/11 -- which also spawned the song "Skylines and Turnstiles." Taking imagery and moods from comic books, horror films and even TV soap operas, Way found in rock a tableau for impassioned lyrical venting on everything from romantic heartbreak to depression, drug abuse and other illnesses that have crossed his emotional threshold. The Three Cheers liner notes proclaim the songs within "The story of a man. A woman. And the corpses of a thousand evil men..." In "Thank You For the Venom," Way invites his subject to heap on the tribulations: "So give me all your poison/And give me all your pills/And give me your hopless hearts/And make me ill," but adding that "You'll never make me leave/I wear this on my sleeve." A fear of loss, meanwhile, pervades the lyrics to "Helena," an ode to he and MCR bassist Mikey Way's late grandmother.

The Black Parade in 2006 turns all this heart-wringing into high concept, yielding a melodramatic passion play that focused on death as both Way (as "The Patient") and the band (as "The Black Parade") adopt character roles to ostensibly put a distanced perspective on the music. It's both tough and tender; in "Cancer," for instance, Way's dying Patient laments that "the hardest part of this (dying) is leaving you." And he draws a pretty solid bead on MCR's audience in "Teenagers," noting that MCR's target audience "could care less as long as someone'll bleed." Fortunately they're in luck; Way and company show no sign that their musical and lyrical bloodletting will wane any time soon.