'A lot of the fear, a lot of the self-loathing comes from being raised a Catholic. Any love you could come up with doesn't mean anything compared to the love of Jesus - your parents don't love you as much as Jesus.'

So sayeth MCR lead singer Gerard Way in a recent interview, an observation that handily sums up the motivation behind his New Jersey band's ambitious and epic new concept album - their third.

Hailed as the return of the rock opera, The Black Parade is bound to go down as one of those seminal albums, the importance of which, like Pink Floyd's The Wall, is not immediately appreciated until it comes out as a film.

That there's a film in the making is no big surprise: this, like all good concept albums, works on multiple levels, leaving itself wide open to interpretation.

The theme of The Black Parade, unsurprisingly, is death, based around the plight of a character known simply as The Patient, who dies in hospital of cancer. As his life flashes before his eyes at the moment of death, the most vivid memory comes to him - that of a parade band he'd seen with his father as a child.

It's a pretty big leap of imagination but it works, and so follows a long, and rocking, analysis of what he'd done with his life and whether it had been worth it. Way, a reformed alcoholic and prescription pill addict, admits the album is a thinly veiled reference to himself, which should give fans heart: The Patient ends up dying content that he'd lived life as best he could.

A happy ending; how sweet.

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