News |

Fall Out Boy blasts out more ambitious hooks

Fall Out Boy is the best and brightest from the latest generation of suburban kids influenced by punk style if not its substance. It’s bigger than your average mall-punk band for two reasons: Patrick Stump sings, writes and arranges the bombastically catchy pop hits; and lyricist Pete Wentz adds image, glitz and ambition.

No wonder the title of the band’s latest album, “Folie a Deux” (Island), out this week, translates as “a madness shared by two.”

Madness is actually Wentz’s department. The north suburban Wilmette native grew up onstage in the local all-ages circuit with his bandmates, and he’s a bright, troubled attention-grabber who knows how to self-market. He exploits as much as he’s exploited by the media; a marriage to Ashlee Simpson (and the recent birth of their son) hasn’t hurt his status with the tabloids one bit. It all adds a shot of image-building Tabasco to Fall Out Boy’s ultra-competent ear candy.

His band has put out five increasingly ambitious albums and annually moves product by the millions — fat numbers at a time the rest of the music industry is in deep decline. “Folie a Deux,” a mostly successful effort that brims with densely packed songs housing big sing-along choruses, is designed to keep the band’s music blasting from commercial radio stations with a regularity that would make proven hitmakers such as Lil Wayne take notice.

Indeed, Lil Wayne puts in a brief cameo on “Folie a Deux,” as do Elvis Costello, Debbie Harry and Pharrell Williams. They’re all part of the album’s elaborate window dressing, in which the band’s core pop-punk guitar-bass-drums sound incorporates everything from hip-hop and Queen to ’80s new wave and piano ballads. To cover their commercial bases, the Boys hired two primary producers: longtime collaborator Neil Avron plus Williams, who has manufactured hits by everyone from Britney Spears to Jay-Z.

Wentz’s pun-filled lyrics are just allusive enough to sound thought-provoking. They’ll disappoint fans looking for him to dish dirt about his private life, but they drop saucy hints about characters who may or may not be him: “I’m in love with my own sins”; “Sometimes I wanna quit this song and become an accountant now/But I’m no good at math and besides the dollar is down”; “Throw your cameras in the air/Wave ’em like you just don’t care.”

These oblique trinkets are delivered with enthusiasm by the energetic if largely anonymous Stump. He frequently overdubs his pliant voice steeped in third-hand blues and soul into a multi-octave choir. More than anyone in the band, he’s the reason Fall Out Boy’s songs ring out on the radio.

His arrangements morph from straight-up rock to full-on orchestral fantasias, augmented with strings and horns. When he settles in behind a piano to croon “What a Catch, Donnie,” he sounds as if he’s about to turn into Elton John.

He gets his John Lee Hooker blues hat on for “I Don’t Care,” borrows a riff from the Romantics on “She’s My Winona” and rides Freddie Mercury’s coattails straight into the falsetto stratosphere on “The (Shipped) Gold Standard.”

In the vacuum-packed world of commercial pop, Stump’s man-of-many-voices routine is quite entertaining and the band’s lack of drama-queen posturing (on record, anyway) almost refreshing. As Wentz/Stump say on “Disloyal Order of Water Buffaloes”: “Nobody wants to hear you sing about tragedy.”

But the over-the-top production grows wearying. When a massive wordless vocal hook punctuates the blues riff in “I Don’t Care,” it’s as gratuitous as the pyro at a stadium concert. “w.a.m.s.” includes a jazzy guitar interlude that could’ve been imported from an old Steely Dan album, and the song then winds down with an incongruous, grainy-sounding back-porch blues coda. “20 Dollar Nose Bleed” has a head-scratching spoken-word wrap-up. When in doubt, Fall Out Boy wants more, and the songs are packed to bursting with so many ideas (not all of them good) that the latter half of the album turns into a mess.

Fall Out Boy conquered a segment of the world with pop songs that everyone can shout in their cars, and the band members should be applauded for wanting more out of their music as they mature. But sometimes more is simply too much.

———-

greg@gregkot.com