The third installment of My Chemical Romance’s Conventional Weapons consists of the tracks “The World is Ugly” and “The Light behind Your Eyes” and, while making sense in the grand scheme of the album, the songs make Number Three as a single fall a bit flat. Almost every album in the history of ever has at least one or two slow songs thrown into the middle of the album to create an element of diversity. The tracks on Number Threeappear to be MCR’s slow songs for Conventional Weapons. And, while the problem isn’t that the two slow songs were put on the same single, “The World is Ugly” and “The Light behind Your Eyes” just aren’t spectacular sad songs when paired.
The A-side track of Number Three is “The World is Ugly” is a classic MCR love song that has the general tone of their most recent album Danger Days, but also sounds like perhaps their most famous love song: “I Don’t Love You”. The message of the song is essentially what the chorus says: “I just wanted you to know/that the world is ugly/but you’re beautiful to me”. With a simple musicality, the song puts the focus more on lead singer Gerard Way’s presentation of the lyrics which he, as always, does quite well. In the last chorus, a crescendo of emotion and close-to-tears vocals make “The World is Ugly” a beautifully composed song of pain and passion.
While I haven’t a problem with “The World is Ugly”, I do think “The Light behind Your Eyes” falls flat and the two songs paired make Number Three suffer as a single album. “The Light behind Your Eyes”is a song of pain, regret, and grief. The lyrical content is quite beautiful, yet its repetitive nature and the slow, almost boring musical presentation of it make the song as a whole just seem slow and uninteresting. The mournful orchestral introduction of the song sets the slow, sad tone of the song that is carried on by the strumming of an acoustic guitar. The song, unfortunately, never really escapes this tone in the way “The World is Ugly” does.
Upon hearing the fifth and sixth songs in My Chemical Romance’s Conventional Weapons series of singles, I am fairly certain that each song, and each of the “Number” singles would make a greater impact if listened to in the context of a whole album. While Number Three was not as enjoyable as Number One or Number Two, I still have high hopes for the Conventional Weapons album as a whole. The next single in the series, Number Four will be released on January 8th of 2013, and Number Five(the final single in the series) on February 5th.