Second Chances, Undeserved

For whatever reason, I had very quickly dismissed both The Fray and My Chemical Romance out of hand this year. Yesterday, for equally inscrutable reasons -- actually, part of it was allmusic.com's year-end wrap-up of big singles that included The Fray, so I guess it was scrutable -- I decided to give both of them another chance.

What I like about the great majority of my hunches is that they're right. Good god, these are just awful records. My Chemical Romance sounds like a bunch of Emo kids discovered Pink Floyd's The Wall, and just didn't get it. Wallowing in self-pity just doesn't scale very well. I think Green Day's American Idiot, which may have had the same sorts of ambitions, worked because it limited itself to conceptual high-mindedness, and kept the music right in the band's wheelhouse. The over-orchestration on The Black Parade is downright painful.

The linked article, by the way, has some great pithy quotes in it, including the quip that The Fray is "kind of like if Coldplay grew up in the Midwest."