Music Reviews

Call me a nostalgic punk, but midway through Danger Days, when the whippersnappers of My Chemical Romance pay lyric-quoting tribute to both the Stooges and the MC5 (and in the same song, no less), they certainly score bonus points with this strict constructionist. Significantly, though, the “street walking cheetah” and “kick out the jams” snippets found on the careening “Party Poison” aren’t just gratuitous nods to the thumb-to-nose stance of agit-rock past. This long-awaited follow-up to 2006’s The Black Parade finds singer Gerard Way and crew pulling a conceptual back-to-the-future musical spin as a gaggle of “generation nothing” survivors trying to run and gun their way to safety in a post-apocalyptic world gone wild.

In that climate, what better lifesavers are there than, say, “Vampire Money,” built on U.K. bad boys the Damned’s “Neat Neat Neat,” or “S/C/A/R/E/C/R/O/W,” whose glam-bang riffs come straight outta Mott the Hoople? Now, as then, boogaloo dudes carry the news — and what pluperfectly young, loud, and snotty tidings they be.