It’s everything they could want and more. The reaction to every song is feverish from the beginning of the album to the end, even though the singles – particularly Welcome To The Black Parade – are bound to raise the temperature even higher. Every deep cut is beloved, but they all very much pull their own weight, from the soul-stirring The End to the velveteen drama of Sleep, while Cancer feels like an existential Bohemian Rhapsody. The song that arguably flourishes most in this theatrical realm, of course, is Mama, a wicked slice of dark yet bonkers vaudeville that’s unafraid to take things way over the top.
And yet this is one small cog in a massive, whirring theatrical machine. There’s a sense of deep devotion behind this world, and though it’s detailed, nothing gets lost even in a space this big. Before I Don’t Love You, the crowd hold up their ‘YEA’ and ‘NAY’ cards to vote on whether to execute a group of people, and when they choose ‘YEA’, those people on the B-stage are shot by a firing squad in an explosion of pyro. At the conclusion, following a reprise of The End, a character called the Clerk returns as a Pierrot and stabs Gerard in the throat. He dances about in celebration to hidden track Blood, before unveiling a bomb vest and detonating it.