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MODERN ROCK
SEAN LENNON, "FRIENDLY FIRE" (CAPITOL)
The massive bank account aside, most of us can relate to Sean Lennon's
challenges growing up in dad's shadow. But his troubles run even deeper on
his second album, the long-overdue follow-up to "Into the Sun" (1998). In
one melancholy, piano- and acoustic guitar-driven ballad after another,
Lennon finds catharsis from a sad series of events that started when his
longtime girlfriend, actress Bijou Phillips, cheated on him with his best
friend, who then died in a motorcycle accident.As psychodramas go, this
one is potentially rich turf for a talented artist to mine as Papa John's
famous issues with his mum, but the now 30-year-old Sean is hardly singer
and much less songwriter enough to give us a "Julia" or a "Mother." "If
life is just a dream / Which of us is dreaming / And who will wake up
screaming / 'Cause if I had to die tonight / I'd rather be with you," he
sings in "Parachute," which, like most of the songs here, falls far short of
baring the painful emotions its author seemed to think he was sharing.
Sean is aiming for Elliott Smith or Rufus Wainwright, but the other
comparison is inevitable, and it would be even if he'd issued this disc
under a pseudonym: The slippery, post-psychedelic arrangements and the
breathy vocals veritably scream "early Beatles solo efforts," referencing
Paul McCartney as often as his father, and making one wonder why, if he
really didn't want the comparisons, he didn't turn to virtually any other
sound, from electronica to crunk, to try to make his own mark as an artist.
My Chemical Romance, "The Black Parade" (Reprise)
This New Jersey quintet is hardly the only teen-hero group at the top of the
charts sporting black eyeliner and bringing Gothic melodrama into the
mainstream. But My Chemical Romance rocks a lot harder and packs much
heavier hooks than Evanescence, and it's both more ambitious and more
tongue-in-cheek about its bombast than AFI. To be sure, it's plenty silly.
Yet it's much harder to dismiss out of hand.The group's third album, the
follow-up to its 2004 breakthrough "Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge," is a
bona fide rock opera focusing on a protagonist, The Patient, whose life was
turned upside-down by 9/11 and who is now looking back on his fears and
regrets as he's dying of cancer. Bandleader Gerard Way cites classic-rock
epics such as Pink Floyd's "The Wall" and Queen's "A Night at the Opera" as
his inspirations, but there's also the more obvious connection to Green Day:
The band tapped thucer of "American Idiot," Rob Cavallo to juggle absurdly
over-the-top strings, horns, a marching band, a booming cannon ... and a
vocal cameo by Liza Minnelli during a Kurt Weill-flavored tune called
"Mama."
In the end, "The Black Parade" is much closer to Meat Loaf's original
Wagnerian take on teenage angst, "Bat Out of Hell," than any of those
antecedents, and it's just as much of a guilty pleasure.
Sure, it's hard not to laugh at Way's messianic aspirations and
whinier-than-Billy Corgan crooning in a song like "Welcome to the Black
Parade." ("When I was a young boy / My father took me into the city / To
see a marching band / He said, 'Son, when you grow up, will you be the
savior of the broken / The beaten and the damned.' ") But Way actually
wants us to chuckle, and he's laughing at his own cult following in the song
"Teenagers," where he frankly confesses, "Teenagers scare the living s---
out of me!" You won't hear AFI saying the same of its legions in the
Despair Faction.
Every generation of tormented teens needs its own overwrought headphones
epic to dissect and parse for meaning deep in the night, and "The Black
Parade" may be the one for Generation Y: It has the perfect mix of silly and
semi-serious lyrics and just the right balance of operatic filigree and
hard-driving pop-punk. And if the kids will one day be embarrassed to say
how much it meant to them at the time, the rest of us can say the same of
like-minded efforts from Phil Spector through "Mellon Collie and the
Infinite Sadness" and simply enjoy humming along.
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