Fall Out Boy - American Beauty/American Psycho

The first time I pushed play on Fall Out Boy's American Beauty/American Psycho, I was at the gym, running on a treadmill. That's not the most glamorous first listen story in the world, but it more or less epitomizes what this album is, which is a pulse-pounding, blood-pumping, ass-kicking set of songs that never once lets up after it starts. The fact that the record pushed me to run something like three miles in 18 minutes—a speed I don't think I've run consistently since my high school cross country days—explains perfectly why Fall Out Boy's music has become favored soundtrack material at sporting venues: these are songs meant for cranking your adrenaline up to 11.

But American Beauty/American Psycho is also a lot more than just jock jams. Much like Fall Out Boy's 2013 comeback album, Save Rock and Roll, this record is an audacious, ambitious, and thoroughly impressive pop album. In fact, American Beauty/American Psycho may even be a step up from its predecessor—which is saying quite a lot. On Save Rock and Roll, Fall Out Boy slipped the shackles and ties of their former pop punk identity and forged something more adventurous. Rather than playing by the rules of the genre that made them stars, Fall Out Boy learned to bend genre rules to their will, tossing decades of pop music in the blender to see what would come of it all.

Understandably, then, Save Rock and Roll was a bit of a spitball album, a record that tried everything from theatrical bombast ("The Phoenix") to infectious folk pop ("Young Volcanoes"). Not every song worked, with guest features from Big Sean and Courtney Love serving as special sorts of train wrecks. But the band ultimately achieved their mission by raising themselves from the dead and building a new world where they could be relevant and popular once again.

American Beauty/American Psycho benefits from the fact that Fall Out Boy's new world has already been established. Last time around, the band had to be at least partially worried about whether or not anyone would still care about them after five years away. This time, they were able to go to work without any of those apprehensions, and the result is an album that is just a hell of a lot more fun than anything they've ever released before. Case-in-point is the split-personality title track, a raucous runaway train of a song that changes changes moods and melodic themes like a college freshman changes majors. It feels like the whole thing is only barely holding together by a single thread, but that's part of the charm.

The fun doesn't stop with the title track, either. "Irresistible" kick-starts the album with a regal horn call before exploding into a legitimately funny song about lovers caught in a fatal attraction, while songs like "Centuries" and "Uma Thurman" use menacing samples (from Suzanne Vega's "Tom's Diner" and The Munsters theme song, respectively) as the backbone to sky-scraping pop songs. The former has already become a world-beating single and sports arena standard, thanks to an instantly memorable shout-along chorus. The latter is arguably the best song on this record, a foot-tapping, hand-clapping gem that transports us back to the dance floor of Pulp Fiction's Jack Rabbit Slim's for a twist contest. "She wants to dance like Uma Thurman, bury me 'til I confess," Patrick Stump howls at the beginning of the song. It's a line that could only possibly work in a Fall Out Boy number, just like the Munsters sample is something that only these guys would think to use in a pop song. Both gambles pay off.

"Uma Thurman" forms just one piece of this album's incredibly well-executed mid-section. Starting with the whistle-driven "The Kids Aren't Alright" and ending with the explosive "Fourth of July," this stretch of five songs is the strongest in the band's entire career. "Kids" might be Fall Out Boy's purest pop song, a driving mid-tempo power ballad with a chorus that can only be described as euphoric. Even in lesser hands—without Stump's effortless high notes, Pete Wentz's booming bass foundation, or Joe Trohman's ricochet guitar part—the song would be great. At its core, "Kids" is just a damn fine melody coupled with some of Wentz's finest lyrical work. (The way the line "All those people in those old photographs I've seen are dead" twists the knife on nostalgia is particularly effective.)

Also appearing during the spotless mid-section run are "Jet Pack Blues" and "Novocaine." The former is a percussive should-be single, featuring a stunning bridge that cuts the tempo in half for a moment to allow for a spot of atmospheric guitar work. The latter has been compared to "The Phoenix" for its ferocious aggression, and for the unhinged reckless abandon of Patrick's vocal performance. Both songs keep the party going without missing a beat. They both sound great, too, which can be at least partially credited to Jake Sinclair, who serves as primary producer throughout American Beauty/American Psycho.

Sinclair, an old protégé and engineer for Butch Walker, took over production duties when Walker went off to make his own record (though Butch still gets a couple of credits here, on "Irresistible" and album weak point, "Immortals"). Sinclair, who co-wrote Five Seconds to Summer's "She Looks So Perfect" and produced Matt Nathanson's Last of the Great Pretenders, should become a well-known and in-demand commodity with his work on this record. In addition to providing a few co-writes (on "Uma Thurman" and "Novocaine"), he manages the balancing act that makes all of the disparate pieces of the American Beauty/American Psycho sound—from the arena rock riffs to the whistles, claps, and samples—work as pieces of a cohesive whole. If Sinclair has a weakness, it's putting Andy Hurley's career-best drum work too low in the mix—particularly on the rhythmically dynamic "Fourth of July." But he also pushes Patrick Stump to his best and most potent vocal work ever, something I wouldn't have thought possible after Stump raised the bar on Save Rock and Roll. Suffice to say that one listen to "The Kids Aren’t Alright" or "Twin Skeleton's (Hotel in NYC)" should prove that Stump is in the conversation for best male vocalist working in pop music right now.

One of the most commonly recited anecdotes about American Beauty/American Psycho (in the reviews that were published in timely fashion, at least!) was that Fall Out Boy had gone into a studio and banged out this album in three weeks. For some listeners, that was an excuse to write off the finished product as something rushed and poorly thought out. Lines like "It was recorded in three weeks, and it shows!" were common. The truth is, the quick recording session does show, but not in the way you might expect. Instead of being sloppy and half-formed, American Beauty/American Psycho is a meticulously crafted and fully realized work of pop art, a towering mélange of hooks, samples, and boatloads of different influences that celebrates the possibilities of pop music instead of just following its trends. Where the three-week anecdote makes a difference is in the spontaneity and passion the band fuels into their sound. The goal of any artist should be to spend enough time in the studio to realize their ambitions, but not so much that they lose the fire that makes a good song great. And from track 1 to track 11, this album is never lacking in fire. It may not have a standalone track as great as "Save Rock and Roll" (hey, you can't get Elton John to guest star on your album every time), but on the whole, American Beauty/American Psycho is Fall Out Boy's most consistent and bottom-line best album ever.

Motion City Soundtrack - Go

Motion City Soundtrack - Go

Epitaph/Boombox Generation, 2012

Four stars

Next to a lot of the artists who "broke through to the mainstream" during the popularity explosion of the pop-punk/emo/pop-rock scenes early in the last decade, Motion City Soundtrack have certainly proven to be one of the best, surpassing contemporaries like Fall Out Boy, Panic at the Disco, and New Found Glory either in longevity, prolificism, or overall quality and consistency of work. Out of that same scene, only fans of Jimmy Eat World have experienced a similar flourishing of returns, and no one has covered as much musical and thematic ground over the course of five albums. Much of this success must be credited to frontman Justin Pierre, whose soaring tenor voice and confessional lyrics have kept fans connected to the band, even as they have matured and gone through major shifts in sound. The biggest of those was made on 2007's Even if it Kills Me, where the band shed much of their rock sound in favor of pop sensibilities, delivering sky-high hooks, sugary production, and even a centerpiece piano ballad. While the response to that album was, overall, quite mixed, I've always thought it was their best work, both as a set of songs (the writing is incredibly strong throughout) and as a cohesive album (Pierre's battle with his own demons has never been more resonant). Adversely, I thought 2010's My Dinosaur Life, was a strikingly inconsistent record, featuring some of the band's best songs to date ("Skin and Bones," "The Weakends," "Her Words Destroyed My Planet") alongside some of their very worst (the grating "@!#?@!" and the faux-O.A.R. frat-boy rock of "History Lesson").

Enter Go, the excellent fifth full-length album from the Minneapolis-based band, and arguably their finest work to date. That's not going to be evident to a lot of people on first listen though. Indeed, throughout the first day that I spent with Motion City Soundtrack's latest, I thought it was little more than a very good summer album: the titanic hooks and pop-ready production from Even if it Kills Me are back, and right from the propulsive opener ("Circuits and Wires"), Go feels like the kind of record you throw on for driving around town throughout the summer. When I first started thinking of angles from which to approach this review, the "fun summer pop album" seemed like the stereotype I was destined to go with, but then I sat down and really listened to what Pierre is saying here, and everything changed. At its heart, Go is a record about the duality life and death, and with that theme in mind, it's their most cohesive work to date. Pierre has gone on record about the title, saying that "Go can mean to leave, to give up, to give in, die, basically, or Go can mean to choose life, to live, to experience, to exist, and those emotions and ideas color every song on this album, giving it a heroic and emotional arc, and making it one of the most fully-realized records of the year.

If you're paying attention, the theme is set early on. "I am all motors and gadgets/Organically designed to last a finite length of time," Pierre sings on "Circuits and Wires," and the shadow of death is never far from the proceedings here. He cycles through a pair of dysfunctional love songs (first single "True Romance," whose bridge is an album highpoint, both musically and lyrically, and the already-divisive "Son of a Gun") before launching into the album's centerpiece section. "Timelines," especially, is vintage Motion City Soundtrack, hitting upon the pop-heavy sound of Commit This to Memory and Even if it Kills Me at the beginning, and building into the same kind of feverish bridge that marked many of the songs on Dinosaur Life. Watching the progression play out over the course of the song's four minutes is fitting, as the lyrics chart a similar progression offering both an immersion in nostalgia and a question of fate ("Do you ever wonder how you got to here?" Pierre asks repeatedly). It's the perfect lead in to the album's best and most sobering moment. "Everyone Will Die" is a tremendous symphony of a pop song, a gorgeously moving and innately heartbreaking slam-dunk that is both the album's most affecting number and its most immediate. "It doesn't mean goodbye, it's just a simple truth/The shedding of a lifetime of layers that once embodied you" Pierre croons over a bed of acoustic guitars and synthy ambiance: it's the perfect conclusion to the record's first side, but it's only the middle of the story.

Go is nearly as stellar throughout its second half as it is for its first, but even the songs that aren't 100% successful have their place here, like the insanely catchy "Coma Kid" or the darkly atmospheric "Boxelder." But the final two songs bring us fully back into the album's plot, and it is in these songs that the duality of death and life, between giving up and fighting on, is most palpably felt. The harrowing "Happy Anniversary" epitomizes the former, and it's arguably the darkest song the band has ever penned. The lyrics may play out like a suicide note, but Pierre has said he wrote the song about his grandmother, who died of cancer several years ago, and the words envision her final days of life. "Settle our accounts," "send the kids my love," "time has run its course" the choruses begin, building to the album's most crushingly emotional climax as the white flag is finally waved and life fades. Album closer "Floating Down the River" is the opposite: where "Happy Anniversary" is a surrender, the album's grand finale is an affirmation and a vow to try harder, to live life to the fullest. Just as "Everyone Will Die" ended side one encouraging us to cherish the people and things we love in this life, "Floating Down the River" ends the album on a high note of uplift, and even though it may lack some of the visceral climactic power of past closers (stuff like "Hold Me Down" or "Even if it Kills Me" - still the band's best song), I can hardly imagine a better send-off.

Go is not, song-for-song, a perfect record, nor does it always make good on its ambitious thematic material, but at its finest moments, it is everything the band envisioned and more: it's the finest front-to-back collection of songs they've penned to date, elevated even further by numerous outstanding highlights; it's the perfect balance between their pop sound and their darker, edgier rock side; and lastly, it's the most cohesive and magnetic lyrical journey Pierre has taken us on yet. When he bared his soul and discussed his battle with addiction on Even if it Kills Me, the results were devastating, cathartic, and unforgettable, but here, he offers us with something that is even easier to relate to. Because, just as he sings, "everyone will die," but what matters is the question at hand: what are we going to do with the time that's been given to each of us? It may not resonate with everyone right away, and it most certainly won't hit each listener in exactly the same way it has hit me, but "Go" is the kind of record that could prove to be a "scene classic" and an all-time favorite for a lot of people ten years down the road. It's the kind of record people return to for answers and for comfort years after the release date, and while I can't see yet how it will compare to my other favorite albums of 2012, every time I turn up the volume and sink into these songs, I don't feel so inclined to care.