This is not an album–it’s a Super Bowl halftime show. A pumped-up extravaganza, a star-spangled spectacular, complete with two hundred dancers with American flags on their faces, lots of rah-rah chants, some very contemporary hip-hop undertones, a marching band, and enough rocket’s red glare to put Fort Sumter to shame. Sound and fury for sound and fury’s sake, and didn’t these guys used to be cutesy pop punkers who put out borderline okay cutesy pop punk songs like “Sugar, We’re Goin Down”?
Warped Tour types who were honest about their limitations (“We are hardcore kids that couldn’t quite cut it as hardcore kids” said Pete Wentz, frontman and one-time spouse of Ashlee Simpson). So they did the sane thing and went pop punk (“softcore” is Wentz’s term), and scored big. But starting with 2008’s Folie à Deux and more so on 2013’s post-hiatus Save Rock and Roll (grandiosity alert!) their sound evolved, the pop punk gradually giving way to something bigger—much, much bigger. Guest stars like Elvis Costello, Lil Wayne, Debbie Harry, Courtney Love, Elton John and more! Techno, hip hop and Shostakovich! Actual pirates! A choir of those Uruguayan rugby team members who crashed in the Andes mountains in 1972 and had each other for brunch! The kitchen sink!
There are no guest stars on 2015’s American Beauty/American Psycho—what you get is “arena contemporary,” a genre I just made up. Most of its songs are designed not just to be heard in the bleacher seats, but to literally DRIVE you to the bleacher seats. This is sonic overkill, dance floor bombast designed for a dance club built by Albert Speer, and it never, ever lets up. It’s exhausting. I didn’t listen to it with headphones because I was afraid.
Fall Out Boy pushes all the right buttons, to the extent that I can’t escape the suspicion that the album was put together by committee. Boxes get checked, and what you don’t get in all the calculation and sonic overkill (the backing vocals are positively diabolical) is the slightest sense of spontaneity or, god help us, a moment when you might be able to draw breath. The album is airless, and the calculation is aggressive—American Beauty/American Psycho is less a slab of vinyl than a hostile life form, a rapid shape shifter with 8,000 mouths (check out the title track, I dare you) that darts from crescendo to crescendo with a reckless disregard for listener safety and sanity.
Every ten seconds or so Fall Out Boy goes BIG, and it’s not just exhausting—it’s downright life-sapping. The bombast simply never lets up. I have, and I swear I’m being honest here, never been so happy to come to the end of an album, and not because the music was terrible, but because the music was so unrelentingly ON. So nonstop manic aggressive. So unapologetically bombastic. This baby should come with an oxygen tank.
Remember pop punk? Of course you do—it will be with us forever. Catchy melodies melded to punk aggression, surprisingly clever lyrics, a wise-ass bad boy pose that is purely theoretical and a suppressed rage borne of the fact that its practitioners arrived at the party long after the real party was over—I’ve never been a fan, but I can understand why the legions of latecomers love it. Well, Fall Out Boy threw it overboard. They’re pop punk traitors! Whatever AB/AP is, it sure ain’t pop punk. The snotty dumb charm and pop-punk “melodocity” just ain’t there.
But what is there? The horn flourish that opens and runs through “Irresistible” (the “Radioactive” of our time!) tells us we’re not in Green Day Country anymore, and the stacked backing vocals are annoying, but they’re nothing compared to the full-on vocal assault of the title track. You get lots of woah, woah woah, cheerleader chants galore, and no real intelligence behind the lyrics, although the lines “I think I fell in love again/Maybe I just took too much cough medicine” amuse. And I’m assuming the lines “I wish I dreamt in the shape of your mouth/But it’s your thread count I really care about” refer to Bret Easton Ellis’ novel American Psycho, but if so it’s an idea they fail to explore further in all the rah rah rah. If there’s a message here it’s that if you build a song big enough they will come, lack of message notwithstanding.
“Centuries” includes swipes from Suzanne Vega’s “Tom’s Diner” and frankly they’re the song’s only human element. That “You will remember me for centuries!” is beyond annoying, the massed vocals are there to bury you, and what does it all mean? The lines “Mummified my teenage dreams/No, it’s nothing wrong with me/The kids are all wrong, the story’s all off/Heavy metal broke my heart” stick out because no matter how long I peruse the entire lyric I can’t see any reason for their being there. And Fall Out Boy goes straight from the kids being all wrong to “The Kids Aren’t Alright,” which is a great song title the boys do nothing with. I had hopes early on—nice beat, kinda catchy, but soon enough the song balloons into something bigger than Jesus, with Patrick Stump doing his best imitation of an R&B singer while the backing vocalists ape Arcade Fire, only with ten times the sonic firepower.
“Uma Thurman” is a dance track with hip hop pretensions and the “Munsters TV Theme” thrown in for good measure. The lyrics say a lot without saying anything, but it’s undeniably catchy, vocal overkill notwithstanding. “Jet Pack Blues” is Mumford & Sons on steroids and employs a frequent strategy—Stump opens things up, then in come the supersized vocalists and lots of big percussion. It’s not as bombastic as some of the others, which is good, but unfortunately it’s not all that catchy, and it’s not alone—the sense I get throughout the album is that the huge Cecil B. DeMille productions are covers for a lack of good songs.
“Novocaine” is overkill from beginning to end, and the end result is demoralization—I WANT novocaine when I listen to it. “Fourth of July” opens with some synthesizers and then jumps straight into the deep end—it’s a fireworks show of nonstop vocal overkill. Nothing to see here folks, move on. “Favorite Record” is as close as Fall Out Boy come to getting it right—slinky rhythm, simple sentiment, and by the standards of the album the vocals are restrained, which isn’t to say they don’t go overboard. But they save it until the end, thank the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.
Like “Favorite Record,” “Immortals” shows a bit of restraint, leaving the overkill for the choruses. Unfortunately it’s not a very good song, and like “Centuries” it shows Fall Out Boy were listening to lots of club music. The club hive mind believes that when you’re young and with your friends and doing drugs and listening to your favorite songs you’re going to live forever, so it’s natural that you hear lots of songs about being young and with your friends and doing drugs and hey! you’re going to live forever. Or, and I find this more interesting, you hear songs about how you’re going to die young. I don’t know if Fall Out Boy ever got around to recording a dying young song, but it’s not on American Beauty/American Psycho.
Closer “Twin Skeleton’s (Hotel in NYC)” includes a line that could have served as my entire review of AB/AP: “I wanna throw my hands in the air and scream.” It also includes a few lines that prove Fall Out Boy ain’t great thinkers: “There’s a room in a hotel in New York City/That shares our fate and deserves our pity.” It also includes lots of over-emoting by Stump and is boring. You get lots of “Hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on,” and boy does it go on and on and on. But I don’t want to hold on. I want to let go and fall screaming to my death. Anything to put me out of my misery.
No beauty, no psychosis, just a sound that is unrelentingly big, busy, blaring, and overbearing, American Beauty/American Psycho really is an album in search of a Super Bowl. Maybe one day it will find one. In the meantime, the one thing I don’t hear in the album is joy. Simple joy. As a result, it does something I never thought an album could do—make me nostalgic for early Fall Out Boy. The kiddy punks are alright!
GRADED ON A CURVE:
D
