Dark Matters

J. Edward Keyes on Shuffle

by J. Edward Keyes

Deftones

The Black Parade, the bewitching new record from the New Jersey group My Chemical Romance, opens with a note-for-note re-creation of David Bowie's "Five Years." But where Ziggy gave the world a good half-decade, MCR allots only 120 seconds until the sound of a flatlining EKG ushers in their Boris Karloff afterworld.

Relentless and thoroughly winning, Parade works because the group has found a way to be gigantic without being self-important. Where The Killers' Sam's Town begged earnestness by aping Springsteen's journeyman gravitas, My Chemical Romance instead get their grandeur from Bowie and Bauhaus and Queen. Like those bands, there's something knowingly cartoonish about MCR's enormity, and it allows them to get away with incredible indulgences like blaring brass and fake-gypsy-folk and a Liza Minnelli cameo.

It doesn't hurt that the songs are airtight, full of razorwire guitars and choruses that make sense before they've run through once. Vocalist Gerard Way's got a terrifically sickening voice, and it works well whether he's bitching about betrayal in "I Don't Love You" or smirking through the wham-glam Slade stomp of "Teenagers." Parade is as campy as it is grandiose, which is ultimately what makes it so endearing. Way may be singing that he's "in love with the vampires," but there's no mistaking that those fangs are plastic.

California's Deftones also know a bit about shadow and noise. The group has somehow gotten lumped in with Limp Bizkit and Korn when they actually owe a whole lot more to Hum and Medicine, whose influence shone through on the great-and-celebrated White Pony and great-but-ignored self-titled album. Saturday Night Wrist is even bleaker and denser than both of those outings, the aural approximation of drowning.

Chino Moreno sings like a fly swimming through syrup, and on songs like the majestic "Hole in the Earth" and churning "Cherry Waves," he stretches words out until they become blank tones, thin cracked notes soaring over oceanic guitars. The trouble is that the record is so monolithic it's almost impossible to penetrate. The weather breaks a bit in the last half, but even the plaintive "Xerces" feels frustratingly remote. Wrist is dizzying and fascinating while it's on, but there's not much that demands it be put on very often. It's an orchid in a briar patch, a butterfly sunk in tar. It's the best record you'll never listen to.

All the vampires love www.jedwardkeyes.com.