Frank Iero and Ray Toro do not show up on Hesitant Alien, and brother Mikey Way limits his contributions to a single backing vocal. So this isn’t like one of those Yes-member spinoff albums where Bill Bruford plays the drums and Jon Anderson gets a writing credit on the single and Roger Dean paints the cover. Hesitant Alien is Way’s first solo album since My Chemical Romance broke up, and it’s an attempt to establish a musical identity for him outside the context of a group about which most music listeners have a definite and concrete opinion. Commercial success made Way a citizen of the globe, and let’s just say it’s been awhile since he was eligible to run for Congress in the eighth district.įormat: Eleven-track LP. Early on, My Chemical Romance fit the profile of a striving local band: the combo played basement parties along with all the other punk rock shlubs. He sounds confident.Former My Chemical Romance frontman Gerard Way has released his first solo album, Hesitant Alien.įrom: Gerard Way grew up in Belleville and was living in Hudson County at the time of the formation of the act that would make him famous.
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. Hesitant Alien is something really special from someone that we had all written out of the picture.
He does not at all sing like he does on The Black Parade or Danger Days here. Gerard's also gotten a whole lot better at singing and writing vocal parts that fit the sound like a glove. "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. It goddamn throws you right into the distortion-filled, Fuzz pedal-laden sound this album has to offer. Intro "The Bureau" does a great job of easing you into the sound by not easing you into it at all. 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. This album is so much fun to listen to because you can tell everyone involved had a really good time making it. He sounds like he's having fun and a whole lot of it. 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. 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. 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. I mean hell, the cover art is literally just the "Heroes" cover art for 2014. Gerard was taking pages from David Bowie and other british post-punk acts and he was studying them as hard as he could. It had a sound that was nothing like anything My Chemical Romance put out. Gerard Way, the band's frontman, dropped a single called Action Cat and it was everything Danger Days should've been but couldn't. They ended their run in 2013 and a whole lot of teenagers cried that day. I mean they weren't writing necessarily game-changing stuff in '04 - '06 but at least they sounded like they meant it.Īnd so that was My Chemical Romance. They worked in a lot of synthetic stuff in their sound and the stuff sounded altogether less genuine. 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'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. 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. 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. They were one of those weird bands that could only really exist in the time where they were most active.
Review Summary: Does anyone have the guts to shut me up?