Now this may be controversial to many people who know me, but I am impressed by the new single by My Chemical Romance.
I've never been the biggest champion of US mainstream rock as my hometown friends will happily confess to you. When several of them were in thrall to nu-metal nonsense such as Limp Bizkit and Papa Roach, I remained stoicly loyal to my beloved Manic Street Preachers and UK music in general. To me, nu-metal was a travesty with as much subtlety as being hit by a brick. I can't help but think that teenagers who liked those songs must have felt the music represented some kind of rebellion just because it had swear words in it.
Thankfully though, times have changed.
Even though I first heard A Fever You Can't Sweat Out in January/February, I knew I wouldn't hear a more original, exciting album for the rest of the year. For a debut album, Panic! At The Disco's first release buzzes with excitement, imagination and a wealth of ideas that fuse dancey drum machine beats to 'emo' guitars, with a touch of vaudeville thrown in for good measure. This introduced me to the idea that just because the 'emo' genre is based around insularity, hunched shoulders and self-pity, it can still have a bucketload of ambition.
This is where Welcome to the Black Parade comes in.
It screams melodrama from the word 'go', with the quiet anthemic piano introduction and then, complete with Brian May guitar runs, it turns into a hilariously anthemic pop song. When the brass comes in on the choruses you can't help but smile at the utter grandiose stupidity of it all. It has punch-the-air moments of anthemicity, marching drum beats and an overall feel of 'take it or leave it, this is us'.
Of course not everyone would agree with my love of the song, but I can't help but feel that it has the kind of ambition and epic sound that is almost frowned upon in UK music right now. At the moment the UK masses are in love with garage rock which tells of kitchen sink dramas, the attraction being that tunes by the likes of the Arctics, the Streets, Hard-fi, Jamie T and others reflect the fans' own lives so they can relate. I'm not doubting the lyrical qualities of any of the above (apart from Hard-fi of course), but these tales of suburban mundanity just seem to remind me of how dull life in UK suburbia can get. Nothing to do, no way to get out.
To me music has always been an escape from the more downheartening aspects of life, such as a dead-end supermarket job. Music like that by Panic! and MCR is full of ideas and imagination which shows the willingness of those bands to stretch themselves to the limit, no matter how damn right peculiar the results. They're daring to dream and watching them do it is thrilling.
I'm not badmouthing every UK band at the moment or anything. In terms of this year, Guillemots and Muse have also shown a wonderful desire to go as far as they can in terms of pomposity and ambition in the output. I urge anyone who hasn't to hear/see the video of Knights of Cydonia by the latter as it is one the most equally thrilling and stupid songs you can hear this year. Also, you can't really go wrong with Sao Paulo, the 11 minute closer to the 'Mot's debut LP.
It may seem I've gone a little bit prog-rock in my old age of 22, but I just love listening to songs that blow my head off everytime I hear them. Isn't ambition and creativity what music's all about?
