Punk rock was supposed to kill the rock opera, remember?

The plan was to reduce Jethro Tull to ash, to just say "no" to Yes, to disavow ostentation and eight-minute songs and concept albums like regrettable one-night stands.

In other words, Queensr?che was never supposed to have happened.

But, sadly, that was never the case. And the dudes in My Chemical Romance aren't shedding any tears.

The band's latest disc, "The Black Parade," is a full-on concept album that addresses some Really Big Themes -- life, death, heaven, hell, vampires -- making it a punk-rock morality play. Think the Old Testament, smothered in eyeliner.

And the band members even have taken it upon themselves to adopt a new persona for the album, Chris Gaines-style, calling themselves The Black Parade and performing in matching marching band uniforms that look like they were swiped from Edward Scissorhands' closet.

C'mon, alter egos? Doesn't that add a level of pomp to a genre initially posited on a lack of pretense?

"Sometimes, I think that you can be more honest when you wear a mask," guitarist Frank Iero explains. "It's easier to really cut yourself wide open and show what's inside to everyone if they don't think it's really you. At some point, we felt that donning an alter ego would make us more confident in our own skins and really allow us to write the songs that we needed to write."

And judging from "The Black Parade," this bunch, who will be performing at the Orleans Arena on Wednesday, needed to write songs that reimagine Queen as a bunch of pasty New Jersey kids with a thing for cowbell and Liza Minelli.

The band's latest is a huge-sounding record, an album of well-heeled rebel yells buttressed with string and horn sections and Elton John-worthy piano ballads. It's an extravagant, vaudevillian disc, with frontman Gerard Way howling like he's singing from atop a bed of hot coals, fancying himself the messiah of teen angst.

"When I was a young boy, my father took me into the city to see a marching band," he snarls on "Welcome to the Black Parade." "He said, 'Son, when you grow up, would you be the savior of the broken, the beaten and the damned?' "

Of course he would -- it's a big crowd. There are no longer any outcasts under the punk-rock big top -- everyone is invited, and judging by the size of the venues the band is playing, most everyone shows up.

These days, My Chem has taken to putting on a show as outsized as its audience, which is a new experience for a guy like Iero.

"I never got to go to these grandiose rock shows really," Iero says of his formative years. "But I know that Gerard and Mikey (Way, bassist) got to see Iron Maiden and the big animatronic Eddie, that kind of stuff," he says, laughing. "I don't know if we're going to get to that point, with, like, a huge puppeteer. But hey, you never know."

Yeah, we do. Expect those huge puppets next time around.

Jason Bracelin's "Sounding Off" column appears on Tuesdays. Contact him at 383-0476 or e-mail him at jbracelin@ reviewjournal.com.