Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge

09/14/2004 4:00 PM, Yahoo! Music
Rob O'Connor

Bands walking the tightrope between emo’s sensitive side and punk/metal/industrial/goth’s hard and heavy aggression could take a lesson from these New Jersey youngsters. My Chemical Romance’s second album tightens, sharpens and expands the band’s approach, incorporating humor (“You Know What They Do To Guys Like Us In Prison”), pathos (“The Ghost Of You”) and furious riffage (“Hang ‘Em High”) while setting up shop as the one band most likely to score a motion picture. The liner notes suggest a hazy concept about love and death, but it’s the moody quirks of Howard Benson’s (Motorhead, P.O.D.) production that ramp up the ambitions beyond the group’s expert facility with the often lost art of songwriting. Guitar lines that would satisfy most groups as the catchy hook transform into a grand motif denoting the apocalypse. There’s nothing wrong with such big dreams when you’ve got the firepower to back it up.