Amnesty International 'Chimes of Freedom' salutes Bob Dylan's music

Bob Dylan gets a broad-spectrum musical salute with the  new four-CD, 75-song multi-artist tribute album “Chimes of Freedom: The Songs of Bob Dylan: Honoring 50 Years of Amnesty International,” being released as part of anniversary efforts for the human rights organization.

Participating arists include Adele, Elvis Costello, Pete Townshend, Patti Smith, Miley Cyrus, Ke$ha, Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, My Chemical Romance, Queens of the Stone Age, Sting, Sugarland, Airborne Toxic Event and the Dave Matthews Band.

Dylan was selected as the focus of Amnesty International’s latest project because 2012 also will be the 50th anniversary of the release of his debut album, “Bob Dylan.” The “Chimes of Freedom” album seeks to raise funds for and awareness of the organization that lobbies on behalf of political prisoners and victims of human rights abuses throughout the world.

Live review: My Chemical Romance are goth-punks on a mission

 
Power and fragility intertwine in the music of My Chemical Romance, the flamboyant goth-punk outfit that played the first of two concerts at the Hollywood Palladium on Friday night.

Addressing a capacity crowd at the start of the group's 90-minute performance, frontman Gerard Way declared, "We're on a mission from God to kill everybody." Then his bandmates launched into "Na Na Na (Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na)," a breakneck fuzz-garage jam in which Way exhorts fans to show him their jazz hands. The fans happily complied.

My Chemical Romance broke out of the emo underground in 2004 with "Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge," which sold more than 1 million copies and set the stage for "The Black Parade," an elaborate 2006 rock opera about cancer, terrorism and slim-fit marching-band suits. That album turned Way into an icon for "the broken, the beaten and the damned" -- as he referred to his following in one song -- but it also saddled the group with the kind of responsibility that can eat away at inspiration.

After recording and scrapping a follow-up that Way described as "very boring," My Chemical Romance last year released "Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys," a sharper, less grandiose effort with as much media-studies sarcasm as self-help reassurance.