Review Summary: Does anyone have the guts to shut me up?
My Chemical Romance was a band. They were one of those weird bands that could only really exist in the time where they were most active. If their music was released in any other time than the years of 2001-2010, they really wouldn't have found the success that they had so much of in those years. Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge is at the very core of the weird pop-punk/emo fusion of the mid 2000's and The Black Parade is pretty much the band maturing to their logical conclusion. It's a concept record about a dude that died from cancer recounting his life and afterlife, I mean ***, they were the most myspace band in the world.
So it came as a surprise whenever the band dropped Danger Days in 2010 and they had practically dropped all of their "emo" aesthetic for a really weird, tryhard teenagers ***ting around in a post-apocalyptic setting aesthetic. It didn't quite make for the best album. They worked in a lot of synthetic stuff in their sound and the stuff sounded altogether less genuine. I mean they weren't writing necessarily game-changing stuff in '04 - '06 but at least they sounded like they meant it.
And so that was My Chemical Romance. They ended their run in 2013 and a whole lot of teenagers cried that day. but then something really cool happened. Gerard Way, the band's frontman, dropped a single called Action Cat and it was everything Danger Days should've been but couldn't. It was happier. It was noisier. It had a sound that was nothing like anything My Chemical Romance put out. Gerard was taking pages from David Bowie and other british post-punk acts and he was studying them as hard as he could. I mean hell, the cover art is literally just the "Heroes" cover art for 2014.
Gerard's solo effort, Hesitant Alien, is absolutely shocking coming from the mastermind of a band that had lost all of it's steam years ago. It's the complete opposite of Patrick Stump's flaccid and uninteresting solo effort that followed right after Fall Out Boy had their hiatus, Gerard's solo effort is actually entertaining and fun to listen to. In interviews, Gerard doesn't seem like he even wants to play My Chemical Romance stuff anymore, he's done with it (at least for now) and he's fully, entirely into what he's doing on Hesitant Alien. He sounds genuine again. He sounds like he's having fun and a whole lot of it. This album is so much fun to listen to because you can tell everyone involved had a really good time making it.
Singles "Action Cat", "No Shows" and deeper cut "Millions" are fantastic songs to show someone who has no idea what the album's about because they pretty much put forth all of the facets of the sound that you'll find in the album, and they're damn catchy as well. Intro "The Bureau" does a great job of easing you into the sound by not easing you into it at all. It goddamn throws you right into the distortion-filled, Fuzz pedal-laden sound this album has to offer. "Get the Gang Together" and "How It's Going to Be" are really fun jams to bob your head to and closer "Maya the Psychic" is about as good of a closer as you could ask for here.
Gerard's also gotten a whole lot better at singing and writing vocal parts that fit the sound like a glove. He does not at all sing like he does on The Black Parade or Danger Days here. This is a completely different animal. Hesitant Alien is something really special from someone that we had all written out of the picture. But Gerard's here, he's jumping back out at us, refusing to let us ignore him, and he's actually not hesitant at all. He sounds confident.
