IF THERE was a major music trend to extract from 2008, it was the final hurrah of the great million-selling mainstream album. It was mixed with shockers (Tha Carter III winning critical adoration and going almost triple-platinum) and not-so-shockers (Viva la Vida being another Coldplay megasuccess). But there was also a huge release from the Jonas Brothers, Axl Rose’s Chinese Democracy, another certain-to-be-chart-topper from Nickelback, and last but not least, another Fall Out Boy record. By the end of the year, the huge mainstream rock album didn’t feel quite so dead. The Jonas Brothers (rightly) made Rolling Stone’s best albums list. 2008 left this vague sense of maybe—maybe?—the tides slowly turning, like a little dawning realization that, hey, all those bands who are still able to move the millions? What if they turn out to be the great bands of our time?

Fall Out Boy
Folie á Deux
Rating: 6.9/10
Island, 2008

Having never really understood or liked Infinity on High, I’m destined to overlook key aspects of the Fall Out Boy career arc. But one is unmissable: the band has now held America’s attention for more than a few years, continued to have a crushing impact on emo trends, and continued to advance its musical self in at least marginally surprising directions. And while the newly be-offspringed Pete Wentz is still a half-grown-at-29-years-old cock tease (literally and figuratively)—his lyrical elixir still incorporates equal parts nonsense and hyperbole—Folie á Deux is Fall Out Boy grown up, easily recognizable but measurably evolved.

The initial surprise at how good some of this record is makes for a strong temptation to overrate it, and there are plenty of reasons that would be a mistake. Even when Fall Out Boy’s studio-enhanced swagger is only average, it makes the ground shake under bands like All-American Rejects or Red Jumpsuit Apparatus. But it’s still very, very average: sing-along rockers like “She’s My Winona” might stick in your consciousness night and day for weeks, but they’re more repetitive and exhausting than interesting. At least half of Folie is dedicated to such directionless indulgence; perhaps the best Fall Out Boy’s ever been to date, but no one could be hung for saying that was never anything special.

The rest of it shows what Wentz the bassist/lyricist and Patrick Stump the singer/composer can do when they flesh their experiments out into rock-solid songs. On “20 Dollar Nose Bleed,” they march in The Black Parade, singing together dramatically over plunking piano, soaring trumpets, and a swelling, harmony-backed chorus. The “sandman” reference in the first line of “Headfirst Slide Into Cooperstown on A Bad Bet” is no accident—Stump’s bass-register vocal acrobatics, the thudding electric, and the synth-tinged riffs are up to the comparison. That same murky grunge colors the fantastic lead single “I Don’t Care,” to date the best song Fall Out Boy has ever put on the radio. “27” is a stock-character waste of three minutes, but the climactic solo wouldn’t be out of place in an Eagles hit. Everywhere else—especially on “w.a.m.s”—stylish, ballsy singing almost does for Folie what Gerard Way’s performance did for his band’s previously mentioned piece of magic. And so from Metallica to Queen to the Eagles (?!), notice who it is Fall Out Boy is copying: themselves mostly, but also quite a few bands your dad might have listened to.

Considering Fall Out Boy’s infamy for tongue-in-cheek humor, I don’t find their lyrics a big detractor, but won’t deny how annoying serious adults will find Wentz’s eye-rolling platitudes. (Guitars “scream like fascists,” we “shoot sunshine into our veins,” and if “home is where the heart is, then we’re all just f—ed.”) They’d be better if they gave up being weighty altogether, but there’s a difficult-to-pin-down sense of self-serious even in the lighter moments. (No doubt Wentz’s marriage has something to do with the parable in “Headfirst Slide.”) Even with all that to pick on, there’s far less complaining and way more thinking here than anyone ever expected to give Fall Out Boy credit for.

Maybe I’m imagining a trend where one doesn’t exist, but if an easy-to-hate band like Fall Out Boy can get this decent in just a couple of years—and a group of Disney boys can make a respectable rock album—doesn’t that mean anything can happen? Add to that the cultural domination of truly gifted pop stars like Beyonce, and it seems like the indier-than-thou are slowly edging from ironic appreciation to real admiration. Could bands like Fall Out Boy shift the winds back toward the universal—big, glitzy performance music the whole country loves? They won’t save the CD, but today’s snobs will be more than a little miffed at how much history remembers them.

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