In 2006, My Chemical Romance — by then the edgy screamo band turned flamboyant pop-punk playwright — released the flashy, theatrical piece The Black Parade. It maintained some of the cynicism of the earlier album, and tainted the pop ambitions of a massive tent over it: “The Wall” of the “TRL” era.
While performing one of the album’s signature songs, the caffeinated march “Welcome to the Black Parade,” at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn on Saturday night, the band’s frontman Gerard Way , saw the crowd raising their fists in the air and encouraged them to do it evenly. Harder.
“Come on, I’m 45 doing this,” he said.
The passing of time is the inevitable subtext of every reunion tour. The show was the first of his four arena shows in the New York area and was part of his first major tour for the group in ten years. (His last studio album, Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys, was released in 2010.) Meanwhile, emo has gone through a second or third revival, and Way’s comic book The Umbrella Academy has become a Netflix hit, deepening and solidifying something about the mythology of My Chemical Romance.
Everyone is getting older now, and reality can weigh on memories. In this show, it plays out as a tug-of-war between the fatigue that was there and the triumph that we survived together, and the triumph won in the end.
The band got off to a tentative start and packed the first half of the show with late-career singles, “The Only Hope for Me Is You,” and “Boy Division,” which felt like conventional rock songs. This sternly flamboyant band seemed somehow shy of their hits.
“Let me put on my sunglasses to look like an authority figure,” Way said after a dry half-hour bit and bob. “Mama” took the Nutcracker to the mosh pit. Perhaps the band’s most memorable song, “Helena” was part victory march and part plea.
These epic anthems about fearlessness, rebellion and individuality were building tension. But the tension between the two halves of the show revealed this band’s lighter quirks. It’s a sense of performance and a willingness to be ambitious, while the actual music remains more conventional.
That accessibility is what made My Chemical Romance — The Way possible. My older brother Mikey playing the bass. Guitarists Ray Toro and Frank Hierro — to survive long enough to thrive again. They play confidently, but not always warm. (It was Mikey’s 42nd birthday, and some of the speakers on stage were decorated with drawings made by his children. Most of the band celebrated him with his T-shirt was wearing.)
In front of a trompe l’oeil installation of demolished buildings, the group is musically powerful, Toro delivers taut chaos, and touring drummer Jarrod Alexander delivers the frenzied, heartbreaking anthem “I ‘m Not Okay (I Promise)’ concluded. Transition into the punchier intro of “House of Wolves” with sensitive aggression. There were occasional flickers of rockabilly, ska and even death metal. Way is an acclaimed Wailer, but his grunt is just as powerful.
At times throughout the show, Way seemed a little cautious and never oversang, even on songs that called for abandonment. He wore a bright yellow face dripping with blood, and toward the end of the night, he donned a tight clear mask with Patrick’s echoes. Bateman.
It was the hyper-theatrical Manky version that elevated the band’s off-scene notoriety to pop ubiquity. Later in the show, Way talks about how he navigates his comeback tour after so many years, and the tension between playing for himself and performing for a crowd. I explained the conversation.
“Maybe it was for me,” he admitted.
But not now. “It’s not an ego issue,” he said.
nevertheless. “Sometimes it’s about that,” he continued. “It’s a very delicate way of telling you that I’m going to control you now.” Everyone raised their fists in unison.
My Chemical Romance will perform at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn on Sunday night and at the Prudential Center in Newark on September 20th and 21st. The North American tour continues until October 29th.