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Your support makes all the difference.No one ever became poor through overestimating American youth's capacity for reproachful self-pity - something which came as a shock to Kurt Cobain, but not to any of the subsequent music scenes built on that capacity for complaint. Emo is the latest such movement, My Chemical Romance its supposedly reluctant figurehead band, trafficking in a pop-metal blend that combines the wretched disgust of Nine Inch Nails with the spunky assertiveness of Green Day. The Black Parade is a concept album about death (than which there is, to use the Spinal Tap terminology, none more black) which opens with someone dying of cancer, pleading for a final morphine overdose; but ends, to the band's credit, with an affirmation of life: "I am not afraid to keep on living/ I am not afraid to walk this earth alone." In between it covers, albeit thinly, such familiar issues as parental disapproval, teenage violence, the conflicting pulls of good and evil, and that most vital of rock-star accoutrements, a messiah complex. I can't help noticing how much it all sounds like Placebo.
DOWNLOAD THIS: 'Famous Last Words', 'Dead!', 'Disenchanted'
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