Thanks to the awesome LJ community tothetune, I’ve added two recent scans from Rolling Stone and Kerrang Magazine which talk about the new album. I’ve also included transcripts of the articles beneath the cut of this post, so make sure to check them out!
Gallery Links
Magazine Scans – Kerrang
Magazine Scans – Rolling Stone
Rolling Stone
Stripped Down, Cranked Up: My Chemical Romance Return
By Gavin Edwards
Album TBD
Due Out Spring
Producer Brendan O’Brien
Early in the recording of My Chemical Romance’s fourth album, the band gave mixer Rich Costey a preview. “Everything he heard was just noise and spitting,” remembers singer Gerard Way.
Taken aback, Costy asked, “What are these songs?”
“They’re protest songs,” Way told him. “It’s the sound of ‘no.’” Only later did Way realize exactly what he was protesting: “I was protesting us.”
After a grueling tour behind 2006′s The Black Parade, MCR were worn out and fed up. “I thought the band was going to break up,” says guitarist Frank Iero. “I was expecting a call from Gerard saying, ‘We can’t do it anymore.’” Instead, they took a year off and changed managers. This past February, they went into the old A&M studios in L.A. with Pearl Jam producer Brendan O’Brien.
“The plan was to knock it out and not to overthink it,” says drummer Bob Bryar. They expected to be done by April, but the record ended up taking all year. The goal, Way says, was to drop the theatricality of The Black Parade – which had lots of Floyd-ian pomp and a Liza Minnelli cameo – and “to harness everything that’s great about this band into shorter songs. Almost protopunk, like the Stooges or the MC5.”
The song that pushed them in the right direction was “Trans Am.” It begins with the lyric “I got a bulletproof heart” and then stomps through four minutes of fist-pumping rock.
With that new direction – impassioned but melodic – MCR put aside the noisier material they had been working on and wrote a new batch of songs: the fast-and-dirty “Still Alive,” the anthemic “The Only Hope for Me Is You” and the super-catchy “Death Before Disco” (featuring the chorus “Everybody pay attention to me”). “We simply embraced rock & roll and where we’re from,” Way says. “We learned how to be an American rock band instead of a British rock band.”
On an October afternoon in L.A., MCR are polishing the album. There’s only a month or two of work left: some mixing, some overdums, and sequencing. Today, Way is working on that pivotal cut, “Trans Am” – which he thinks would be enhanced by “1.2 seconds of Queen.”
So he warms up his vocal cords, slips on some headphones, and asks, “Can I get a little bit of reverb? Yeah, it’s a crutch.” Then he sings, “These pigs are after me, after you” a dozen times, creating a “Bohemian Rhapsody” harmony. His performance is sylized, almost like a yodel. With a grin, he announces, “When I start sounding teenage-girlish, that’s the sweet stuff.”
Way’s in a good mood, and not just because he’s almost done with the record. In 2007, he married Lyn-Z (bassist for the band Mindless Self Indulgence); this May, they had a baby girl, Bandit. Way took two weeks off and came back to work “like a zombie, long hair and unshaven.” But fatherhood gave him a new perspective on his lyrics, which focused on despair and death. “I wasn’t writing a record about becoming a dad, and I wasn’t writing a record for my baby girl, but I was writing a record for the person that she would turn into when she was 15, if anything ever happened to me.”
Kerrang!
My Chemical Romance frontman Gerard Way has revealed to Kerrang! that the emo superstars’ forthcoming, as-yet-untitled album will be a vast departure from the epic grandeur and theatrics of 2006′s The Black Parade.
The New Jersey quintet, who have been out of the spotlight for over six months, are currently mixing their fourth studio album (which is tentatively scheduled for release next Spring) at Sunset Sound Studios in Hollywood, California with producer Brendan O’Brien (Peal Jam, Rage Against the Machine).
“Our original game plan was to make a very quick, very visceral record,” says Gerard, who reveals that, for the first time ever, this album will not have one overall concept, instead focusing on several themes like “strength” and “self-preservation”.
“To be able to let go of your game plan is really hard,” he explains. “There were many times where we had to really move on our feet very quickly and say, ‘No, the album’s taking a turn and we need to accept it, because if we fight it we’ll end up with a record that doesn’t make any sense’. This is the first time we’ve been able to go through everything with a fine tooth comb. Everything is taking so much longer, in a really great way. We’ve never been able to go through the songs like this and get things as great as we possibly can. It’s always been like, ‘You’ve got three months to record and two weeks to mix, then you’re back on an airplane to go tour again!’. This time, we afforded ourselves the luxury of exploring every song.
“I’m really glad we did,” Gerard admits with a laugh. “It took a while to figure out what the hell we were gonna do this time!”
Kerrang! had an exclusive playback of nine songs during the mixing process. The songs – working titles for the tracks we heard include Black Dragon Fighting Society, Boy Division, The Only Hope For Me Is You, Save Yourself, I’ll Hold Them Back, Still Alive, Death For Disco, and Trans Am – are the most raucous, dirty rock ‘n’ roll gems we’ve heard from MCR since their 2002 debut I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love.
“Oh, it’s filthy,” notes Gerard. “That’s what I love about it!”.
MCR’s overall sound remains as huge as we’ve come to expect since Black Parade, but the band – also featuring guitarists Frank Iero and Ray Toro, bassist Mikey Way, and drummer Bob Bryar – have a new air of unabashed defiance.
“Even before my daughter was born,” says Gerard (who became a father in May), “I was writing lyrics that were basically, if anything were to happen to me, and she were to turn 15 years old, she’d be able to listen to it and realize that her father and her father’s bandmates and everyone involved in this, weren’t victims. There’s a huge amount of humour in The Black Parade, but there was so much angst.
“And now,” he continues, “there’s angst but it’s different. I think we’re rebelling now as a rock band. We’re trying to keep it pure, but we’re not playing victims anymore.
“We’ve realised that we’re one of the youngest bands at our size,” muses the frontman. “So there’s a responsibility that comes with that, whether it’s to fans or to ouside listeners who aren’t fans, to be the greatest American rock band. That was the goal. And it took a while to get there, but we’re just being the best My Chemical Romance that we can be.”
NEW MCR TRACKS: THE LOWDOWN
Here’s a teaser of what’s to come…
Save Yourself, I’ll Hold Them Back
Sounds like: Down ‘n’ dirty rock ‘n’ roll collides with stadium rock, with a big emotive My Chemical Romance chorus that makes you want to jump up and down in a sea of thousands of other people.
Stand-out lyrics: ‘You can leave this world, leave it all behind/We can steal this car if your folks don’t mind/We can live forever if you’ve got the time…’
Still Alive
Sounds like: A bouncy and playful romp – complete with all-girl gang vocals – about the hazards of playing the Reading and Leeds festivals. Gerard wrote this anthem from the perspective of a teenager getting ready to throw a bottle of piss. Tasty!
Stand-out lyrics: ‘We came here to rough up everyone we see/Get off the stage and ask yourself “Am I still alive?”…’
Death For Disco
Sounds like: A thumping great ode to the pleasures of raucous rock ‘n’ roll hedonism with an unabashedly pop chorus.
Stand-out lyrics: ‘Cos all the good times, they give you cancer…’
Trans Am
Sounds like: Huge melodies and epic songwriting intermingle to create a glorious runaway teen riot.
Stand-out lyrics: ‘Gravity don’t mean too much to me/is this our destiny/This world is after me…’