'Long Live the Black Parade Tour'!

We went for the second night of My Chemical Romance (MCR) at the Indoor Stadium. The venue was packed out. It was a sold-out gig. We saw soooo many friends that night. Ahhhh. This was pure nostalgia. And by golly, MCR still got it! Frontman Gerard Way is never far from his thing as an author of comics, and he still can SING. It was definitely a mass sing-along session. I'm not the biggest fan, so obviously I didn't catch their 2007 show in Singapore. I didn't need to go to this one either, but got dragged along.

I didn't feel like I justified the price of my ticket. It was a good show. I appreciated the storytelling and the thoughtfulness that went into it. It might as well be a full theatre production with a storyline and all that. I didn't realize that when I camped for tickets and scored them, they were right in the front standing pen. The friends loved where we were. Hehhehee. Okaaaay lah — some gigs are only fun standing. 

'Long Live the Black Parade Tour' meant that we ought to know all of the album's songs. This is a rock opera concept album centered on 'The Patient', a young man dying of terminal cancer. He faces his mortality, memories, and impending death personified as a marching band. Then in this tour, MCR shifted the focus from the 2006 album’s original dying patient storyline to a dystopian, in-universe propaganda narrative set inside Draag, a fictional authoritarian regime.

The band played all of 'The Black Parade' (2006) in the first half of the show. We began with 'The End' and 'Dead' and 'This is How I Disappear'. The crowd needn't no warming up. We leapt right into it. Everyone indeed knew the lyrics to every song in this album. Wow.

To get the MCR hype and understand their goth universe, it's not even about the goth. It's about the stories which began in 2002 with the band's debut album 'I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love'. MCR weaves tragic lore spans interconnected conceptual albums and live theatrical storylines.

My Chemical Romance have stated their influences — The Smashing Pumpkins, Pink Floyd, Queen, Iron Maiden, Joy Division... including Sunny Day Real Estate and Fugazi. That's everybody! Catching a MCR show is really a walk down the memory lane. 

The premise for this show, the theme of the tour and all. Now, we need to understand it too. Absolutely cinematic and dark fantasy. Set in a fictional dystopia of Draag, it's a Soviet-inspired authoritarian regime governed by the Grand Immortal Dictator. 'The Black Parade' is re-framed within a totalitarian state. It utilizes mock elections, reconditioning camps, executions, and a sci-fi time-loop framework overseen by characters like Nurse Sylvia, who honestly is a creepy character. There's a whole backstory that you could google.

The production team went all out. The stagecraft was impeccable. What was that man set on afire (in a fire resistant suit) who sprinted across the stage, along with the spurts of flames! Wow. That setlist was different from the first show. Wheeeee! The second part of the show held 'The Ghost of You' and 'Thank You for the Venom' (both are from 'Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge', 2004)! It was a great night.