I Brought you my Bullets, you Brought me Your Love

Locations
Call Number: CD Rock My I
On Shelf At: Pittsfield Branch

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Pittsfield Adult A/V 2-week checkout	CD Rock My I	2-week checkout	On Shelf

Compact disc.
Lyrics included on insert.
Romance -- Honey, this mirror isn't big enough for the two of us -- Vampires will never hurt you -- Drowning lessons -- Our lady of sorrows -- Headfirst for halos -- Skylines and turnstiles -- Early sunsets over Monroeville -- This is the best day ever -- Cubicles -- Demolition lovers.
My Chemical Romance is: Gerard Way, vocals ; Mikey Way, bass guitar ; Ray Toro, guitar ; Matt Pelissier, drums ; Frank Iero, guitar.

COMMUNITY REVIEWS

When I bought my copy... submitted by allison on August 16, 2014, 9:50am it still had a sticker on the front saying "Featuring members of Pencey Prep!" Which I think is hilarious, particularly since I didn't get my physical copy until 2009, in a Best Buy.

So, on to actual reviewing. This is a very very good album, with some flaws - but not many, considering how and when it was made. It's produced by Geoff Rickly, of Thursday, which was a coup at the time (and probably still would be.) Rickly, however, isn't a professional producer, and as a result most of these tracks could use a hard songwriting edit; they're all just a little too long. It's forgivable, but they could all drop 30 seconds and be stronger - and that's probably most apparent with Demolition Lovers, which is a hyper-romantic Bonnie & Clyde update with huge amounts of style and an evocative narrative that is sabotaged by bloat. The only really unworthy track is Cubicles, and its main crime is that it's boring: a boring office stalker story, told in a boring way, I can't really even get into it because I couldn't tell you when the last time was that I heard it and I listen to this album at least once a week otherwise. Guitarist Frank Iero didn't join the band until two weeks prior to recording, though he'd been supporting them from early on, helping with booking them their first shows (opening for his band prior to their breakup), selling their merch, and talking them up. The absence of his composition work on all but two tracks means there's a counterpoint missing from some of these songs - there's been a lot said about the interplay between Ray Toro's heavy metal aesthetic and Iero's punk style, but that's also oversimplifying matters. Iero has a knack for really lovely light melodies that thread through the work and create a tension that is lacking otherwise. Also the punk thing, yes, but there isn't a lack of that in the band, even without Iero.

As musical performance it's good, but far from perfect; vocalist Gerard Way is singing from his throat, and lacks power and confidence as a result. Drummer Matt Pelissier lacks both precision and power, under-creative and over-reliant on boring rolls and flourishes. Bass is buried to the degree that I'm not always sure it's there - something that changes a lot in later albums as Mikey Way gains confidence in an instrument he honestly lacked experience with at this point. Toro's guitar work is good but he took on too large a share of the work to allow him to make it distinctive; Iero came to the table too late to contribute much. There's more backstory on the recording process that makes the quality remarkable, but I don't think the album needs sympathy points for you to enjoy it. Go looking later if you want to know.

Bullets is the album that makes it most clear that MCR started life as pop-punk: all the elements are here, and you can hear the influence of their contemporaries and the place they were carving out for themselves as unique in the Thursday-dominated New Jersey scene. There's a song about vampires, and one about zombies, a song about bearing witness to the fall of the towers on 9/11, and one about desperately wanting to kill yourself. It's all told in a cinematic style, and considering it was a band with compositional duties led by a film school grad (Toro) and a comic book creator (GWay, who was still more or less in talks optioning a series to the Cartoon Network while the album was in the works), that's not particularly shocking.

Unsurprisingly, this album works best taken as a whole and in order; I recommend deleting Cubicles first, but follow your bliss. Romance sets tone, and segues into Honey..., a fantastic angry breakup song. Vampires Will Never Hurt you is also fantastic, a desperate love narrative that tells a story that's reversed later in the album in Monroeville: in Vampires, the narrator begs for death if they become a monstrous threat; in Monroeville, the desperate narrator realizes their lover has become a monstrous threat, and hovers indecisively, unable to make the hard choice for survival. Drowning Lessons is good but not great - it lacks something that would mark it as specifically MCR rather than just decent middle of the road NJ pop-punk. Our Lady of Sorrows, on the other hand, is the grand entrance of the band's mission statement; this band saves lives. "Stand. Take my hand. Never be afraid again." Headfirst For Halos is ostensibly a joke, but a very dark, very danceable, and in retrospect, highly autobiographical one. I recently read an article about the band that pointed out that what they did, what they were best at, was examining their fears, naming their terrors, shining a bright light on them, making them glitter, turning them into spectacle. Halos does that, putting deep suicidal depression, alcoholism, drug abuse, and social anxiety into a perky bopping tune with Peter Pan references and a break for syncopated hand-clapping. It's simultaneously terrible and wonderful, and it's hugely cathartic. It's got a good beat and you can dance to it.

After Halos comes Skylines and Turnstiles. According to the band, this is their first song: the first one they wrote, the point at which they came together as a band. It's the 9/11 song, and unlike the rest of the album, there's very little metaphor here. It's an account of watching it happen, and tellingly for the rest of MCR's career as a band, it opens with the line, "You're not in this alone."

This Is The Best Day Ever is a little unremarkable after Skylines and Monroeville, I think you already know how I feel about Cubicles, and the album closes with Demolition Lovers. Which is lovely despite its flaws.

Highly recommended if you're interested in horror, comic books, pop-punk, the NJ music scene, art responding to 9/11 (which is what MCR was - not just Skylines, but as an entire project). Also recommended if you benefit from resonance with art that examines depression, anxiety, and alcoholism. And recommended if you're looking for music that you can generally rely on to not strike out at the listener with misogyny, xenophobia, and racism.

ok submitted by Kenes on July 11, 2020, 6:13pm great musical performance