 |
 |
OTTAWA - New Jersey emo-punks My Chemical Romance lived up to all the hype surrounding their latest album with a brilliantly theatrical concert for the 6,000 frenzied fans at Scotiabank Place last night.
And the body count didn't include many of the fans' parents watching the Senators game at Marshies.
Too bad for the folks glued to the tube. They missed a pretty spectacular concert.
This was punk rock as a Broadway musical. MCR opened the show in character as the devilish marching band The Black Parade.
Produced by Green Day's Rob Cavallo, The Black Parade is a modern morality play about death in the wake of AIDS and 9/11. Critics have compared it, rather generously, to The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and David Bowie's The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust.
Even if it isn't that good, it certainly stood up to the comparisons.
|
So while last night's setlist was predictable, the super-theatrical show was anything but, with singer Way arriving onstage in a hospital gurney, IV and skeletal white makeup while singing the album's opening track, The End, before the rest of the band, dressed as a funeral marching band, joined in.
Fans were treated to Dead, This Is How I Disappear, The Sharpest Lives, Welcome To the Black Parade, I Don't Love You, House of Wolves, Cancer and the album's second single, Mama, among others, all stripped down to the bone to reveal each song's raw, emotional power.
But it was the Black Parade theatrical dressing that really sold the show, giving Way a huge canvas to play with as the slightly sardonic ringmaster, calling for a shower of ticker-tape or a show-stopping display of fireworks while constantly prowling the stage like a dominatrix.
Once they finished with The Black Parade the band took a short break and returned as themselves, performing their hits I'm Not O.K. before launching into a string of fan-favourite numbers.
In the end, the concert was a genuine kick-in-the-pants thrill, a real demonstration of the talent of MCR.
Opening band The Bled was just revolting, straddling the line between being brilliantly offensive and merely loud. They were nasty with tribal punk that sounded like amplified puking. For this middle-aged critic, and I'll assume, the dozens of parents waiting for their precious darlings, The Bled was unbearable, which, I'm guessing, was the whole point.