LATE TO THE PARADE

I really liked My Chemical Romance's song "I'm Not Okay (I Promise)," and I liked the video even more. It cracked me up on a regular basis while it was omnipresent on MTV. But the second single, the title of which I don't even remember anymore, kinda sucked, so I didn't buy the record. And the first single - I believe it was for the title track - from The Black Parade - was terrible, too, pompous and overwrought. But the new single, "Teenagers," is fucking tremendous. A 2:41 chunk of T.Rex with balls, the lyrics are just as overwrought as ever, but frontman Gerard Way's sense of humor, sorta invisible since that "I'm Not Okay" video, is front and center, and the song is basically a big stomping romp, with one of the best choruses I've heard in a couple of years:

Teenagers scare the living shit out of me
They could care less as long as someone'll bleed
So darken your clothes, or strike a violent pose
Maybe they'll leave you alone, but not me

The video's great, too - an audience of surly and apathetic high schoolers gradually rising up to seize the stage from a panicked-looking MCR. Plus, cheerleaders in gas masks. [Check it out here.]

I'm not endorsing The Black Parade as an album; it's uneven, and steals all the wrong ideas from Pink Floyd's The Wall. But this is one of the best songs of the year, no question.

TODAY ON PTW

GLORIOR BELLI
"Said Lucifer In Twilight"
from Manifesting The Raging Beast (Southern Lord)

The French takeover of black metal continues apace. Glorior Belli are a furious act in the spirit of Deathspell Omega, Funeral Mist and to a lesser degree Antaeus; the band’s songs feature multiple tempo shifts, going from 1000mph blitzkrieg riffage to doomy despair and back. Guitarist/vocalist/ mastermind Infestvvs leans toward verbosity, though this track is the only one on the album that actually seems like a monologue with a backing band, much in the way that Deathspell Omega’s Kenôse did. (Anytime you’ve written a song where each verse begins with the word “Therefore,” you should go back and rethink.) [Read the rest here.]

THIS WEEK IN THE SCENE

Hot Topic's sponsorship of the third-annual Sounds of the Underground tour is a great thing. It affords metalcore bands mainstream exposure without paying Sharon Osbourne $75,000 -- or whatever she would charge them to play Ozzfest with her zombie husband.

As with any package tour, however, the lineup for 2007's Sounds of the Underground is far from perfect. And unlike the makeup counter at Hot Topic, there's a dizzying number of choices -- 14, to be exact.

To help Clevelanders rock out, we present the "Hot or Not?" concert guide. Here are the bands to catch and those to avoid:[Read the rest here.]

THIS WEEK IN THE VOICE

VARIOUS ARTISTS
King Britt Presents The Cosmic Lounge Vol. 1* (BBE/Rapster)
In the early '70s, jazz got spacey, Afro-spiritual, and overwhelmingly weird. From Sun Ra to Alice Coltrane to Pharoah Sanders to Kalaparusha Maurice McIntyre, artists began incorporating synths, African percussion, flutes, chanting, tablas, mbiras, and all manner of other exotic instruments into album-side-long pieces with titles often in Swahili or Hindi. DJ King Britt has compiled 11 relatively concise and lesser-known examples of this decade-long musical left turn and sequenced them (without mixing) into a trance-inducing yet thrilling glimpse of the way things used to be. [Read the rest here.]


*(I think compilations should never be titled Vol. 1; you're just setting folks up for disappointment. Put the thing out, and if there's demand - which, in this case, I don't think there will be, except from me and the readership of, say, Destination: Out and Church Number Nine - release a Vol. 2. But don't get my hopes up straight out of the gate. And if you're a band whose career is on the skids, don't flatter yourselves by exiting your major label deal with a "Greatest Hits, Vol. 1." Seriously. Come on. Anyway, my point is that this is a terrific compilation, I'm just disappointed in their use of the "Vol. 1" gambit.)

THIS WEEK IN THE SCENE

CHRIS CORNELL
Carry On (Suretone/Interscope)
Chris Cornell can't dance. If he could, he wouldn't have transformed "Billie Jean" into a funkless piano-and-guitar dirge, a trick he pulls eight tracks into his second solo album...Cornell has one of the great voices in modern rock -- gruff, yet powerfully melodic. Frequently trafficking in unexpected imagery, his lyrics jump out amid the hard-rock clichés smothering contemporary radio. And on this album, he's got a solid backing band with another secret-weapon guitarist: the maniacal noise-sculptor and avant-gardist, Gary Lucas of Gods and Monsters. [Read the rest here.]