Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys

Gerard Way has reinvented his hair. Again. First a jet-black mop, then a close-cropped bleach-blond military cut, Gerard’s tresses are now a stringy Crayola red. His ‘do seems to be a bellwether for the band he fronts, My Chemical Romance, whose first album in four years, Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys, was released today. Like the lead singer’s ever-changing aesthetic, Danger Days reveals a rock band made famous by nursing teenage wounds, struggling to find an identity as the scar tissue knits.

Danger Days’s conceit is vaguely theatrical, though not as self-important as MCR’s last album, The Black Parade, which took emo-pop to operatic levels. A loose narrative is constructed around the band trading the East Coast for the West, donning washed-out denim and taking up 1950s-inspired ray guns to fight bad guys, vigilante-style. Song titles, replete with slashes and parentheses, are as cryptic as ever. Radio reports interject between tracks, barely intelligible in their Kerouac-inspired verbal scatting. It’s a party-all-night album, with lots of futuristic blips, pops and fizzles lacing through lyrics about running away and living forever.

It’s a shame that Danger Days lacks visceral sentiment: the roughshod anger of I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love, the adolescent desperation of Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge, the grandiose existentialism of The Black Parade. MCR is no longer raging against cruel high schoolers and lusting for blood. The band members are older, happier, and more settled than when we heard from them last. Gerard, for one, has a wife and baby daughter, and is six years sober. The Only Hope For Me Is You recalls some of the group’s deep teenage need, making it one of the album’s best tracks. The catchiest of tunes, Bulletproof Heart, opens with an anthem-like melody ensconcing nebulous lyrics: “Gravity / don’t mean that much to me / I’m who I’ve got to be / These pigs are after me.” Fully two songs use the lyrics “na na na” repeatedly, and when that becomes too trite, “uh uh uh”- a far cry from the poetic melange of irony and ire of previous albums. MCR should hope its die-hard fans aren’t listening too closely as they party till dawn.