Fall Out Boy is back again with their second post-hiatus album, American Beauty/American Psycho, released on January 16th this year. It didn’t take them that long to recover from the surprisingly good welcome of Save Rock and Roll (2013) and now they are back in business with another piece of that special FOB-kind of pop rock.
When you talk about this band, you can’t go without mentioning their hiatus that started soon after their 2008 Folie à Deux and ended around four years later. If you were there, when they came back with Save Rock and Roll, you already know, how much development and growing up there was. “We went away, came back and did ’Save Rock and Roll’, pretty much expecting that was for our cult fans. We weren’t expecting it to be this big return to radio and big success, which it was,” the vocalist Patrick Stump stated in an interview for Rocksound 1/2015.
American Beauty/American Psycho certainly keeps on with the Save Rock and Roll style. American Beauty is like the more athletic and outgoing brother of Save Rock and Roll, while the latter was still slightly darker. The sentimentality is now placed with youthful ambition, dedicating this album to the people who know what they want and how they get there.
Fall Out Boy has upgraded their musical style and now they are going out of their comfort zone. They are here to try things they haven’t tried before, like dropping out their guitars and making a pop album they will later perform like a metal one. Older fans have no reason to be scared, ‘cause even though there has been a lot of book writing, punk playing and “super slippery” baby delivering during these few last years, they still have a good hang of how to write lyrics. The writing is still witty and immediately recognizable to be Fall Out Boy.
The fifth track Uma Thurman is so dancy that it’s impossible to listen to it just one time. Novocaine will bring you to the good old rage, and Immortals, which was featured in Disney’s Big Hero 6, really has that traditional Fall Out Boy-chorus that leaves you with the question of whether you were supposed to feel anxious, adventurous or both. With those and other songs like Jetpack Blues, Irresistible and the title track American Beauty/American Psycho, this album has a strong variety of moods to pick from, each one represented with an experience only achieved by long days, years of practice and a little hint of perfectionism.
In a world where the music industry has changed a lot in the last few years I think Fall Out Boy has caught up very well. Maybe they didn’t think they would come back to a big group of fans, but they were wrong: they just came back to a different group of them. Social media addicted teens, who share their interests, make it easy for a good and catchy song to go viral. Now that Fall Out Boy shares their fan base with bands like OneRepublic and Imagine Dragons, it’s not about their past anymore, but what they do now.
American Beauty/American Psycho is full of energy. This band isn’t afraid of what people will think about this album, because they know it’s awesome. I don’t think that there’s anything better than listening to artists who are happy with what they’re doing!