Fall Out Boy Helps Make Things Alright

As its career has progressed Fall Out Boy maintains its impressive level of fire in the belly. Better still in the case of the new "The Kids Aren't Alright" these guys know how not to overwhelm listeners with their cresting intensity. You can tell Pete Wentz is in his masterfully defined creative zone on bass. He strums slowly, surely, confidently. Fall Out Boy could have phoned in some mischievous whistling and asked the record label to start pushing some of the royalty checks their direction but that's not exactly how these joes operate now is it? Patrick Stump allows the poetry of his lyrics to transcend the everyday realm of idle chit chat that pops up so regularly in our usual daily races. Lots of symbolism leaping off the page. "Former heroes who quit too late" could refer to any one of a number of athletes who kept squeezing out doses of creative juices long after the odometer reached zero. Iconic movie scenes grab center stage in my head when I see the words "Empty your sadness like you're dumping your purse on my bedroom floor." Remember that scene in The Breakfast Club where Ally Sheedy's character dumps the contents of her bag all over the place and suddenly, the sullen loner begins going into detail about what constitutes the ins and outs of her stratosphere? Fall Out Boy shows off how it can create a song where all you need to do is listen and use your imagination to tell whatever story appears most apt. It can be claimed that books hold an advantage over TV in that you have to create pictures when reading whereas TV hands you the imagery. Fall Out Boys rocks hard cosmically...not technically. There's a pronounced degree of subtlety at play here. The guitar playing pulls on the reigns to demonstrate some control over super charged content that could have otherwise come pouring out of the scorching cauldron in undiluted form, waiting to pounce on an unsuspecting victim. Andy Hurley's an essentially a behind the scenes player behind the drums. Not once does he attempt to monopolize attention with vulgar displays of power. That's the mark of someone comfortable in his craft. 10 years running one suspects the honeymoon phase might really be over. The whistling which gets "The Kids Aren't Alright" rolling tends towards the spooky. Patrick's lyrics complement the ick factor divinely. I've never heard of dirty sadness before. In fact I thought grief was supposed to be called upon as some sort of cleansing agent designed to make even the most unbearable of human miseries tolerable. I believe dirty's more of a general reference to life's slings and arrows. Grunge rock from olden (not highly olden but creeping that way) got to be a little tiresome in the way the purveyors of the genre seemed content to stare at their shoes and maintain a "Life sucks" take on their worlds. Patrick's reference to wanting to sit around and gaze at his shoes hearkens back to that genre's age. "And it's our time now if you want it to be" alludes to getting out there and owning your patch of space on the globe. As a rule the pacing keeps itself sure-footed, unrushed, giving you time to let these words sink in and maybe offer you the opportunity to figure out where to go from here. "The Kids Aren't Alright" very much displays the sheen needed to linger in a listener's brain long after the fade out. Fall Out Boy's relevancy in the second decade of the 21st century need not be questioned. These "kids" are doing quite nicely thank you.