Just because the gothed-out jersey boys in My Chemical Romance can now fill arenas doesn't mean their hearts aren't still in the mildewed basements where they got their start playing DIY hardcore shows. As this live set shows, My Chem remain a punk band, and their flashes of reckless, claws-bared greatness tend to happen outside the studio, in front of the fans. Life on the Murder Scene, which also includes two DVDs collecting video diaries and performance footage, captures more than a few of those flashes, whether it's the way they barrel through "Give 'Em Hell, Kid" at breakneck speed without once checking the rearview mirror, or the way singer Gerard Way ad-libs, Gordon Gano-style, "I hope you know this is gonna go down on your permanent rrrrrreeeeeeeeeeecord" during "You Know What They Do to Guys Like Us in Prison." Way's voice is in top form, even when he's shrieking (because, seriously, even shrieking can be out of tune), and Life on the Murder Scene pulls all the right guns from My Chem's arsenal of songs. As live albums go, this one is A-O-fucking-K.

“The Everchanging Spectrum of a Lie”

The opener off the Welsh group’s The Big Roar album was an epic one, but the band was worried that track had polarized fans. “The first song is eight minutes long,” Rhydian Dafydd, the Joy Formidable bassist, said. “If you did that in the Seventies people would be, ‘Whatever.’ You do it now, people think, ‘Holy s---!’ Some people think it’s the f---ing greatest track on the entire album, and some people think it’s f---ing boring. It’s that element of needing to challenge people.” The band concluded through the song’s lyrics that love was the “everchanging spectrum of a lie.”