MUSIC REVIEW
Fantastical Thrust (and Hair Color)
Chad Batka for The New York Times
My Chemical Romance, with the vocalist Gerard Way, right, and the guitarist Frank Iero, at Roseland Ballroom.
By JON CARAMANICA
Published: December 5, 2010
What’s the quickest way out of New Jersey? Judging by the new My Chemical Romance album, it might be a spaceship. “Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys,” the group’s fourth album and its first in four years, is a shameless, grand and sometimes goofy work that sounds destined for ComicCon.
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Chad Batka for The New York Times
Brian Fallon, the lead singer of the Gaslight Anthem, at Roseland Ballroom on Friday night.
In the video for the first single, “Na Na Na (Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na),”the band members play postapocalyptic outlaws on a violent road chase. For a group given to heart-rending bombast, the move toward the fantastical is an unexpected one.
At Roseland Ballroom on Friday night the band was earthbound, mostly, but not modest, in a terrific, thrusting show that felt bigger than even this big room. The concert was part of a holiday series sponsored by the radio station Rock 101.9 (WRXP-FM), which paired the group with another breakthrough New Jersey band, the Gaslight Anthem, whose approach to escape is more micro.
It was an unusual match. Even at its most insular, My Chemical Romance has always been something of a fabulist band, lacing its emo with flashes of metal and lacerated lyrics. By contrast the Gaslight Anthem’s members are committed naturalists, their blues-and-soul-influenced rock sporting heavy, unhealed scars. My Chemical Romance’s songs are shrieks; the Gaslight Anthem’s are croaky whispers.
If the Gaslight Anthem is to be forever saddled with comparisons to Bruce Springsteen, another New Jerseyite with magnifying-glass lyrics, then maybe My Chemical Romance will have to learn to start dodging the words “Bon Jovi” in the coming years. Compared with My Chemical Romance’s earlier albums, “Danger Days” (Reprise) is comically simple, lyrically and emotionally. The huge swelling chords and jumpy tempo of “Planetary (GO!)” recall nothing so much as the Black Eyed Peas. Elsewhere hair metal and glam rock references abound, the line between flamboyant and tacky hopelessly blurred.
And yet, taken out of context, the album is punchy and effective, a knowing attempt at supersizing the group’s sound in keeping with its longstanding ambition.
Onstage the wiry Gerard Way has learned how to communicate that bigness. His look was arena glam: body all bent and twisted, hair a bright synthetic red. The new songs in particular captured the push and pull between glamour and muscle, helped greatly by the addition of the assaultive drummer Michael Pedicone, though they had only a glancing impact when compared with the older material.
“It doesn’t matter what you believe,” Mr. Way told the crowd. “But I believe we are the” — he said, using a sharp word for emphasis — “greatest,” before setting off into “I’m Not Okay (I Promise),” one of the band’s biggest and most anthemic hits, which spurred a roaring singalong. The main set closed with an anguished, triumphant, cathartic “Helena,” the sort of aggressive plaint that was once its bread and butter but that in light of the group’s evolving direction, felt nostalgic.
Looking in the rearview mirror might be the Gaslight Anthem’s primary mode of being. Its songs teem with specificity of detail, every word a memory. Though “American Slang” (SideOneDummy), the band’s third album, talks a lot about leaving New Jersey behind, the lead singer, Brian Fallon, remains fixated on place — in this case New York, which dominates the new songs and also his stage patter. “I don’t think anyone’s from New York,” he said. “Who of you was born before 1990 on 33rd Street?”
But even though the Gaslight Anthem’s geographical perspective has broadened, its musical topography remains more or less unchanged, with tough, ragged, determined songs that don’t quite fill a room this size, though not for lack of effort. “We Came to Dance” and “Miles Davis & the Cool” traded some of their swing for punch, helped by Benny Horowitz’s rigorous and hard drumming, and Alex Rosamilia’s guitar expanded “The ’59 Sound” into something more than a remembrance.
The Gaslight Anthem ended its set with “The Backseat,” which felt like a regression to smallness until the end, when the group closed it out with a few bars of U2’s “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,” Mr. Fallon spreading his steady rasp as wide as it could go. As the final gesture before giving over the stage to the headliner, it was maybe a wink: Hey, we can do big too.
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