Reprise
2007
Lies For The Liars
About This Album
It isn't completely fair to compare the Used to My Chemical Romance, despite their associations in the past (they covered Queen and David Bowie's "Under Pressure" as a team) and surface similarities. The Used have deeper roots in punk (there's a reason why former drummer Branden Steineckert high-tailed it for a gig with Rancid), and they always were more purely emo than MCR. Nevertheless, the Used's third studio album, Lies for the Liars, sure brings to mind The Black Parade, particularly in how the Used pile on lurid, florid art rock trappings upon their pop-punk, borrowing vocal arrangements from Queen and imagery from The Wall (this time, it's the worms); the album also has a song called "Hospital" that recalls the deathbed escapades of Gerard Way. But where Lies for the Liars really shares similarities with The Black Parade is in how it's a big-budget escalation of the band's sound designed to leave the emo tag behind. While there's a haze of pretension hanging over some of the record -- nowhere more so than on the awful single "The Bird and the Worm," a noisy hookless cluster of staccato strings, druid vocals, and narcissistic emo romanticism -- this plays more poppy than proggy, as the Used dabble in all sorts of classic pop sounds, kicking off the album with a sleek, echoey new wave guitar and then spiking the chorus of "With Me Tonight" with blaring horns straight out of Chicago.
Track List (try tracks 2,3,4,8,9 and 11)

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