Review Summary: This one was probably really fun to make.
Snotty wit, sarcasm, bucket-fulls of vim and vigor. Fall Out Boy are our generation's teenage band of brothers - go-kart races with paintball guns, spontaneous bungee jumping, meaningless road-trips. They're who you go to when you wanna do something stupid, just cuz. And while like any other such group they have, in recent years, had to get their sh
it together and make mature-grown up stuff, they're still those noisy kids at heart. They may have lofty ideas and galaxy-sized dreams now, but are probably still most comfortable letting the decibels speak for themselves.Â*
PAX AM Days is rude, boisterous and impatient, essentially 13 minutes of pop-punk mostly without the pop, a motley crew of short songs locked and loaded for quick direct action. The EP is basically ruled by the rhythm outfield of Joe-and-Andy. Having proved that the backbone of rock in FOB's early works was entirely their doing, by managing to export it wholesale into The Damned Things,
PAX AM Days sees the duo let loose tracks like
Love, Sex, Death, with molten guitar work and machine-gun beats, and
Art of Keeping Up Disappearances, which sounds like they took the boring normal parts of a song out and just kept the breakdown. Trohman and Hurley hustle up a sound as fierce as it is instinctive, and added to this fray is Stump like you've never seen him. Patrick has a distinctive yet versatile voice, but has always been a singer's singer at heart, which makes it an interesting experience to hear him trade his melodic pipes for warcries in the glam-rock/punk outing
Hot to the Touch, Cold on the Inside, or shake, rattle and roll his way through the feral chaos of
Eternal Summer.
Despite criticism the band has taken from over-refining and -polishing their sound,
PAX AM Days does, unfortunately but inevitably, suffer the consequences of enthusiasm without afterthought. A joyous noise though this EP may be, it would most definitely have benefited from slightly better production, which would've highlighted the nuances of Patrick's more eccentric daring moments and Joe-and-Andy's more technical episodes. For the lack of production, Pete Wentz is practically inaudiable, and in more ways than just his very average bass playing – having pushed off the need to be intentionally straightforward as in
Save Rock and Roll, FOB are back to their usual tongue-in-cheek goodness, but you can hardly make out whatever lyrics the Wentz mind has churned out. Tracks like
We Were Doomed from the Start are simply sonic manifestations of one-liners, nothing more – and this wouldn't be such a shame if we didn't already know what FOB are capable of. The partial exception to this, closing track
Caffiene Cold, is fascinating in that it manages to combine the general fuzz and bluster of this EP with a decent chorus hook and semblances of a pop vibe and structure, resulting in something pleasantly reminiscent of outtakes from
Take This to Your Grave.
If you took a physical manifestation of FOB's sound, stuck a rather large syringe into it and proceeded to suck out the theatrics of
Save Rock and Roll, the diverse ingenuity of
Folie a Deux, and some of Stump's highly eccentric solo project, leaving all spunk intact, this EP would be the rumpled, flaming mess you'd find festering at the bottom of your petri-dish. For all they have changed in the past decade, their undying urge to raise a racket has been the root of all consistently throughout their vast discography. It's interesting that Fall Out Boy decided to follow up the most carefully crafted record of their career with this, for when you put aside all their styles, reinventions and ambitions,
PAX AM Days is very much the other half of the equation. God forbid they ever put out a whole album that sounds like this, but loud stupid noise once in awhile is a wonderful thing.
