Album Review: May Death Never Stop You: The Greatest Hits 2001-2013 by My Chemical Romance

My Chemical Romance may be the perfect new millennial rock band. Always poised for a significant hit, they instead wound up with a devoted cult following that peaked around the release of 2006's The Black Parade, a gobsmacked concept album on par with Pink Floyd's The Wall or maybe Marilyn Manson's Antichrist Superstar, but MCR were always more in tune with teen angst and were always more fun, as the 2014 hits compilation May Death Never Stop You: The Greatest Hits 2001-2013 proves. The 19-track compilation contains three demos plus the new song "Fake Your Death," which opens a compilation that otherwise diligently marches forth in chronological order.

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On March 22 2013, My Chemical Romance called time on a beautiful relationship - one which produced four studio albums and spawned an army - in their own heads, a literal army - of fiercely devoted fans. Released a year to the day MCR announced their split (well, one year and two days to be precise, but let’s forgive that small indiscretion), best of compilation May Death Never Stop You sets us out on a smartly chronological last hurrah through the back story of the band, with a new track, some intriguingly juicy demos and a raft of video out-takes thrown in for good measure. It’s strange somehow to think that My Chemical Romance released their first album more than a decade ago, within months of formation.

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Sometimes, it may seem like an easy job to create a Greatest Hits album for a band: line up all the radio hits in a row, slap a new song or remix on there, get some fancy cover art in place, cash yer paycheck. Yet for a “mainstream cult band” like My Chemical Romance was, that task is actually not as easy as you might think. On the one hand, the group had legit hits, but their biggest smash (the Top 10 single “Welcome to the Black Parade”) is by no means their most identifiable song, and if you were going on radio support alone, you’d have to completely disregard their scrappy 2002 debut I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love, which basically sounded like the rest of what was gracing the pages of Alternative Press at the time.

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