Review Summary: If just one mistake is all it will take, then Fall Out Boy have clearly done far too much.
Post-breakup Fall Out Boy is, to put it bluntly, nothing but a fucking mess. There’s no way the same band who made the quintessential 2000s pop-punk radio smashes “Sugar, We’re Going Down” and “Dead on Arrival” are the same ones who tarnished Suzanne Vega’s good name on the absolutely limp and vocally awkward “Centuries”. After
Save Rock and Roll proved that Fall Out Boy’s increasingly poppier direction was stripping away any sense of energy or identity that they had before calling it quits, one would think they would do something to improve. Yet, at least
Save Rock and Roll had an “Alone Together” or a “Young Volcanoes”, a song that stood out amongst the “My Songs Know What You Did in the Dark (Light ‘Em Up)”s of the record.
American Beauty / American Psycho has absolutely nothing. Well, at least close to nothing.
Right off the bat, this album pretty much lets you know what to expect. If the sterile, vapid “Irresistible” wasn’t already enough of a turn-off, then maybe the title track will be, in all its electronic-infused, migraine-inducing glory. For those with a high tolerance for pain, surely “Centuries” will be the final nail in the coffin. After all, there’s no point in sampling “Tom’s Diner” if it isn’t over a lifeless, completely unmemorable faux-anthem destined to become ESPN’s go-to track for college football promotion, isn’t it?
American Beauty / American Psycho just feels so hollow and worn out, like Patrick Stump and his crew are just recording for the fuck of it and not putting any real soul into the process. Fall Out Boy are slowly following the path of Maroon 5, and by that I mean focusing primarily on the lead singer and making the other members of the band do nothing but stand there and play their barely audible instruments. Sure, there’s the occasional noticeable guitar riff, and the drums are easy to hear at some places, but even if they’re not playing pop-punk anymore, that’s no reason to just take them out of the picture. Hell, the rhythm of “Centuries” is eerily similar to that of Levine’s “Animals”!
Stump’s vocals are put on full display, which is a shame because they can be downright terrible. Whether it’s the “na na na”s on “Novocaine”, the ear-splitting “remember
meeeeee for
centurieeeeees or the entirety of “Immortals”, his whiny tone has a tendency to cause much a cringe. Whenever he’s not piercing eardrums, he sounds bored, tired of singing the same inane garbage over and over again. Slower songs like “The Kids Aren’t Alright” see him snoozingly spouting off nonsense lines like “stuck in the jetwash, bad trip I couldn’t get off / and maybe I bit off more than I could chew, and overhead of the aqua blue” over a formulaic drumbeat and occasional ten-decibel riff. There is, however, one saving grace to this whole psychotic mess, and that’s the closer, “Twin Skeletons (Hotel in NYC)”. After sifting through ten tracks and 35 minutes of directionless misfires, Fall Out Boy deliver an anthem with rousing guitar, a fist-pumping drumbeat and fiery vocals that epitomize everything this album should have been. The life and energy that is brought to that last track gives a tiny sliver of hope that maybe, just maybe, they’ll learn from their mistakes this time out and craft a better album on their next attempt.
Or maybe they won’t. After all,
American Beauty / American Psycho sold a baffling 218,000 album units in its first week, and in an era where music sales are a fraction of what they once were in the past, that’s enough to place in the upper echelon of openings over the past year. Abandoning their pop-punk wouldn’t have been a problem if Fall Out Boy had been able to put the same energy onto this as they did in the past, but what plagued
Save Rock and Roll is the same thing that will be the downfall of this. It’s an overblown attempt at writing huge, arena-ready songs that just falls flat on its face. This brand of music just isn't their strong suit, and the quicker they realize that the better. After all, no one will remember this album in a year, much less a whole one hundred of them.
