Bemoan Fall Out Boy’s middling ‘Mania’
Seven albums in, Fall Out Boy remains one of rock’s unlikely mainstream success stories, progressing from cult poppunk icons with their 2005 breakthrough singles Sugar, We’re Goin Down and Dance, Dance to overnight celebrities. And today they occupy an inflated position at the top of their genre, the only rock band to play on December’s Jingle Ball circuit alongside names like Taylor Swift and Camila Cabello.
Yet the idea that Fall Out Boy actually makes rock music anymore, as heard on their seventh album, Mania, is debatable. From a fan’s perspective, the band that named a 2013 album Save Rock and
Roll has followed through on that promise, updating the genre for the streaming era and helping popularize the Frankenstein hybrid of stadium riffs and booming programmed drums that have become the prevailing sounds of radio rock.
And then there’s the opposing view: that Fall Out Boy is the lowest common denominator of rock, close enough to pop and EDM to chart in the Top 40 yet too toothless to have any real identity. And Mania, out Friday, unintentionally makes the case that the maximalist beats-rock they helped usher into popularity needs to die. That feeling sets in one minute into the unbearable album’s opening song, Young and Menace, with a screeching EDM drop that almost begs the listener to turn back now.
Keep listening, and there aren’t many redeeming moments. The band moves on to Maroon 5-esque pop-rock, replacing Adam Levine’s paper-thin falsetto with frontman Patrick Stump’s tortured squeeze-toy wails. Really, the only thing separating Fall Out Boy from Maroon 5’s neutered rock jams or the EDM-lite of the Chainsmokers are the band’s aggressive guitars, a lifeline to their poppunk past. Often, they’re employed in songs like Champion that seem destined to be played in sports commercials and exercise classes for years to come. Worse are the guitar-less tracks, strip- ping the group’s music of any identifiable traits, as on the lazy trop-house attempts of single Hold Me Tight Or Don’t.
And while Fall Out Boy have always known their way around an earworm, lyrics have never been their strong suit, and
Mania finds them failing on both fronts, with attempts at wit ranging from selfparody (“I’ll stop wearing black when they make a darker color” on Wilson (Ex
pensive Mistakes] ) to inane wordplay like “Are you smelling that (expletive) / Ode de resistance” on the inexplicably named Stay Frosty Royal Milk Tea.
The band delayed Mania’s release from September until January, saying in interviews that they started fresh after
Young and Menace and Champion fell short of the Hot 100. Yet those four months clearly weren’t enough for the group to churn up any new hits that, from the sounds of Mania, can rival the heights of their previous releases. Save
Rock And Roll this does not.