Spring delivered an idyllic sunset behind the Lifestyle Communities Pavilion last night, not long before My Chemical Romance took the stage. If the band saw the display, likely the musicians recognized the marked contrast with the music it was about to deliver. The New Jersey group’s catalog, especially the comic opera of its newest album, The Black Parade, is about impulses more likely to emerge after the day’s sunlight has been spent.

That collection was the centerpiece of the previous tour, scheduled for Columbus but canceled because of illness. “We killed The Black Parade (after that),” lead singer Gerard Way said last night. “You didn’t miss much, other than a lot of prancing and some cool explosions.”

Still, the singer — newly returned to his natural brunet — and band performed an extended set of selections from the album. They were the highlights of the evening and spoke best for the potent personal medicine of the band’s material.

Way has said that his songs help him deal with personal demons, no more plain than on the album’s title track, wherein the protagonist leads a parade of damaged, wounded souls.

Last night, the tune not only thundered with the weight of the mission, but its circus-music style provided an absurdly comedic tone. The surreal, jaunty attitude was distilled in Mama, whose darkly comic catharsis was driven by a foundation lifted from Kurt Weill as surely as the Doors covered the Weimar-era German songwriter nearly 40 years ago.

The tunes also found the band sounding the most like Queen, an inspiration permeates the album.