Fall Out Boy - Infinity On High

It might be a California thing but I just realized the unfortunate connotations of Fall Out Boy's acronym.

Is there a single/video from this that I can watch? I thought FOB were horrible on Saturday Night Live last year.

I listened to this once, definitely has potential. The single's probably peaked, Dom, though I seriously hope I'm wrong.

xp

I'll be buying this on the strength of "This Ain't A Scene" and "Carpal Tunnel Of Love". The latter took some time to grow on me, the former I found instantly likeable.

Although "Don't You Know Who I Think I Am?" is a fantastic song title.

im not sold on 'this aint a scene' yet

...

A couple of years ago, my band was playing a show in that little shitty room above the Trocadero in Philly, and there's this door from which you can see down into the mainspace, and FOB was playing. I didn't like the music so much at the time, but I do remember thinking that spin move that the guitarists do was ace.

No such thing.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=2RwqnLArhbA

counterexample:
http://g-images.amazon.com/images/G/01/ciu/60/c6/2977b220dca091a7ad3e3010.L.jpg

-- Zwan (anthonyisrigh...), January 26th, 2007.

i think the thing they'd first have to get over is the impulse to PM jessie's girl with opaque heartache until they collide in an ill-advised hook-up that precipitates a crushing wave of narcissistic self-doubt, right?

x-post see "mature"

My god, emo just justified itself entirely!

-- mike powell (revelator...), January 26th, 2007 3:55 PM. (later)

I'M MESSAGING JESSIE'S GIRL
I'M STUCK HERE TEXTING JESSIE'S GIRL

This a rewritten cover that is screaming to be made.

It's because they suck
-- Zwan (anthonyisrigh...), January 26th, 2007 4:07 PM. (later)

Oh, forgot to tow the party line there. My bad.

-- Tantrum The Cat (tantrumtheca...), January 26th, 2007

i think it's sad that there's so little room to be both disgusted and totally fascinated by a band without being accused of thinking that it's 'so bad it's good.'

The Lloyd Dobler Syndrome, I Was 5 When Nevermind Came Out
"My Mouth Is Indie, My Cock Is Metal, My Hair Can't Decide"
"Aiming For The Colour And The Shape (But Trying Too Hard)"
"Our Accountant Thinks We Need The Word 'Myspace' In This One"
"Candlebox Sold Twice As Much With Half The Words"
"When We Figure Out Power Ballads...Watch Out!!"
"The Video For This One Will Interpolate V For Vendetta"
"Naturall,y The Ugly Guy Wrote Everything"
"Significant Other Got Good Press Too"
"The Afghan Whigs Would Be Huge Today (If Greg Dulli Wasn't Huge Now)"
"One Of These Days I'm Just Gonna Use The Word Bitch In A Song And Be Done With It"
"I Really Don't See Us Saving The Music Industry"

-- mike powell (revelator...), January 26th, 2007 4:26 PM. (later)

In my experience: "I'm both disgusted and totally fascinated by (x)"= "I like (x) on its own merits but am deathly afraid to say so".

Zwan, I may not agree with you, but these are pretty goddamned funny.

Not really feeling the new track either. I hope the album's less of a disappointment than Black Parade but I don't have much hope. When these bands try to diversify, they seem to compromise their strengths.

I just don't know what to say to anyone who hears a better song in "Love Like Winter" than in "Sugar We're Going Down" or "A Little Less Sixteen Candles, a Little More 'Touch Me.'"

It might be a California thing but I just realized the unfortunate connotations of Fall Out Boy's acronym.

-- Ned Raggett (ne...), January 25th, 2007. (Ned)

If you mean "fresh off the boat" - we have that acronym in New Jersey too. Or is it something else?

Hey Tim, so I could give a good answer to your question, I went back and listened to "Love Like Winter" a couple times, after which point I started liking it. It's not badly crafted. I guess my original impression was that I found it twee-er than most of this stuff with a New Romantic-ish quality that turned me off (even compared to Panic! At the Disco whom I really like.)

genius...

I agree with "I'm Like a Lawyer...", but I also think "This Ain't a Scene It's a [Goddamn] Arms Race" is the best song on the new album. At least my fav.

Looks like my intestines are safe for now.

consider yourselves lucky!

I actually made a point of watching SNL to catch them last week, to give them another fair chance. They are terrible. Their single is terrible. SNL is terrible. Fall Out Boy is Terrible.

Fun times on tour.

i love ilms rampant popism withers when the posters can identify with those actually making the pop

*slow clap*

jesus, "HOW ilms popism &c &c ..."

ILM AINT A SCENE, IT'S A GODDAMN ARMS RACE OMG UR RIGHT

I actually like the big hit now, ironically. Haven't gotten into the new hit yet.

new hit> old hit.
really new single is really good, too.

3 songs they've released off of folie a deux are :((((

"i dont care" sounds like "i kissed a girl"
"head first slide" sounds like idk some real boring alt rock i don't want to listen to
"what a catch donnie" sounds like train

infinity on high is still great though

Yeah, none of these are very good, I think I like "Lake Effect Kid" from the lol mixtape more than any of the songs from the album so far. "What A Catch, Donnie" is kinda nice even if it goes on way too long, I don't mind them taking a turn into MOR piano pop and the Elvis Costello bridge fits in perfectly. After they shit the bed on that "Beat It" cover I don't have as much faith in their ability to at least be a good singles band.

dom, al: this album is good to borderline great

the three singles that leaked are arguably the worst three songs though i've reconsidered "head first slide"

Yeah, I really like a lot of the stuff on this. In general, Stump = gold, Wentz lyrics tho are still shit.

it's pretty similar to infinity on high in terms of overall sound (remarkably slick, really densely layered) but i think this one might be better front to back w/o the huge peaks that infinty on high had

there are moments on here where stump sounds a lot like gerard way - it's kinda freaky

Stump = gold, Wentz lyrics tho are still shit.

― Mordy, Tuesday, 9 December 2008 09:31 (28 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

^^^this is a fair point

there's a song off the new LP that totally cops 'mama useta say' by junior. and patrick admits it. good taste, that man.

hating on Fall Out Boy = you are an old man

(not addressed to anybody here, just a comment on Fall Out Boy)

my appreciation of FOB is a matter of public record.

do the kids still listen to this stuff? honest question. it seems like Fallout Boy/PatD style 'emo'-whatever was really huge for like a single year and then totally disappeared, but maybe that's just from where I'm sitting.

also for a second I thought this thread title said "Infinitely High" and I was like "damn that's a good title"

I'm seeing these guys on Tuesday.

i get the strong sense 'the kids' have more or less moved on but i guess the sales figures will tell us by how much in a couple weeks. really looking forward to hearing this record either way, though.

I think the record is going to sell well. It sounds really great.

I still regularly confuse FOB with Panic! at the Disco and the only song I can recall hearing from these bands that I remember enjoying was "Thanks for the Memories." Whatever happened to My Chemical Romance btw? As goes myspace so went their band...?

I wasn't aware ILM endorsed FOB with such enthusiasm.

Stump = gold, Wentz lyrics tho are still shit.

yup (though i might have a higher tolerance for wentz's lyrics), stump is incredible on this album. his range is like a male mary j blige or something. he's on another level in terms of modern rock singing, and as the meme goes, he could be reading the ingredients of a cereal box on this album and it wouldn't matter

????

MJB doesn't have that great of range. Stump is a pretty good singer, tho.

I feel like I'm taking crazy pills

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/47/Fobfolie.jpg

New quiz: Furry, Kanye or Both?

rev - maybe mjb was a bad example but the point is that he reminds me of an r&b singer more than a rock singer

i think that cover is kind of dope

i don't really know what's going on w/ My Chemical Romance besides taking way longer between albums than FOB. their last one was pretty big, but who really knows what the next'll be like.

I think I made a post sometime back where I insisted that a) Stumpsy is a better singer than Rihanna, and b) Stump is a better r&b singer than Rihanna, so that's how I break it down to an extent.

Way back when FOB dropped "From Under the Cork Tree" my math.rock/music technician mate said FOB stood, from a production/"behind the boards" standpoint, a lot closer to RnB than they do rock music. Dunno if that was just him being zingy or if that's borne out by actually hard stats.

dling this as we speak, btw

"This Ain't a Scene, It's an Arms Race" sounds like a Bobby Brown song until the guitars come in.

al i saw my chem earlier this year and they had a strict no camera policy (like security guards confiscating the cameras of 14 year old girls) so i thought they were gonna be playing tons of new shit but they didn't play one new song at all so who knows

New quiz: Furry, Kanye or Both?

Isn't that the kid from Where The Wild Things Are?

yeah didn't MCR make a big deal of playing The Black Parade in its entirety at every show, and then finally retiring that tiresome set at the end of the tour this year? supposedly the next thing they release is going to be a Dylan cover for the Watchmen soundtrack, and taking 3 years between albums and then leaning even more classic rock would just about kill any interest I have left in them.

this is pretty damn good so far, although i'm kinda annoyed that i found out the CD has a 'pregap' hidden track after i bought it on iTunes (although it's probably short and crappy like most hidden tracks, so i'll get over it).

I know no one cares about Gym Class Heroes around here but me but Stump produces the hell out of half that album. Got no problem with that guy.

And as far as Wentz -- well, we may not like him...but the little girls understand, I guess. My daughter's friends, anyway. Or at least they did like a year ago, now it's all Chris Brown and the vampire guy from Twilight.

haha yeah i was gonna say, do the tweens still give a shit about Mr. Simpson?

i'm gonna go ahead and stubbornly say there's not much of anything that could motivate to willingly listen to gym class heroes

I'm gonna go ahead and say that that is the least surprising post on ILM today or ever.

but i mean really i would like to hear stump's beats but ugh fuckin' "travy"

yeah i dont think alex is alone there

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/14/arts/music/14cara.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print

Jon Caramanica article on Stump in the Sunday NY Times

NO one paid Patrick Stump much mind during an evening shopping excursion at the East Village vintage vinyl emporium Academy Records early last month. Flipping through racks of albums swiftly, like the record-shop employee he once was, he worked his way methodically through the store — blues, then jazz, then world, then rock — all the while bopping his head to the soul obscurity Leo’s Sunshipp, piped in over the store’s speaker system: just another record nerd, sating his jones.

Mr. Stump, 24, prefers it this way.

“The first day I met him was the day Ray Charles died,” said Travis McCoy, the frontman of Gym Class Heroes, whom Mr. Stump has produced and who are signed to Decaydance, the label run by Mr. Wentz. “He was in the dressing room, crying. I knew from that point on, dude was special."

He also has an unusually expansive view of his art. He speaks knowledgeably about jazz fusion, early blues, underground hip-hop and hardcore punk. He likens the task of songwriting to Robert McKee’s rules for screenwriting. He argues, not altogether unconvincingly, for the influence of John Cage on Fall Out Boy’s music. When talking about how to deliver Mr. Wentz’s lyrics in the most effective fashion, he invokes David Mamet: “He says that when you’re an actor, you don’t figure out the character or whatever, you just” — and here Mr. Stump inserted a Mametesque adverb — “get up there and read your lines so that people can hear them.”

good article. stump is ridiculously likable.

Yea mostly although I think he's trying a little too hard with his Ornette Coleman and John Cage references in regards to aspects of their sound.

I knew I liked that guy.

trying too hard maybe, but at least trying! haha remember when joe henry hired ornette coleman to play on his richard pryor song? maybe it's better to talk about it than to do it?

dude is so short

he was in our bathroom at work the other day and i had this instinctual urge to give him noogies, thankfully resisted, as a mammoth bodyguard was stationed in front of the door.

he and some assistant/manager/whatever were talking about doing some web animation. stumpy wanted to do the voices.

oh yeah, whole band is tiny. every time they're on TRL or any show where they all stand together, they're always dwarfed by some female host.

Is the sleeve illustration by Jay Ryan?

oh yeah, whole band is tiny. every time they're on TRL or any show where they all stand together, they're always dwarfed by some female host.

― BIG BROOS aka the steenspringer (some dude), Wednesday, December 17, 2008 12:17 AM (13 hours ago) Bookmark

if you're not fuckin with 'folie a deux' i have this for you

http://www.pet-comfort-products.com/images/angry-cat-01.jpg

word. never has a video worked harder to put me off a song I liked than "America's Suitehearts," though.

i like 'w.a.m.s.'

lol yeah al that vid sucks

"the (shipped) gold standard" is maybe my fav song by them ever

"w.a.m.s" is dope too

"The (Shipped) Gold Standard" is brilliant but I'm also deeply partial to "Disloyal Order of Water Buffaloes" and "Headfirst Slide Into Cooperstown On a Bad Bet".

this is really one of those albums where it seems like every time i listen to it, a new song pops out at me. last time it was, mostly because of patrick's piano + vocals bridge, "what a catch, donnie" and this time it was "west coast smoker".

an unrelated thought: they build up to the last minute or thirty seconds of their songs so well

Yeah, totally: "America's Sweethearts" final thirty seconds makes everything before it (which had sounded exceedingly good) seem like a tease.

listened to this in the car the other day and yeah, it really is holding up well. "Gold Standard" is so great, particularly the 'horseshoe crab' verse.

"Gold Standard" is so great, particularly the 'horseshoe crab' verse.

― Hateful Guard at Maryland Training School for Boys (some dude), Monday, March 9, 2009 8:35 AM (5 days ago) Bookmark

this song hits me hard

'you can only blame your problems on the world for so long
before it all becomes the same old song'

Sometimes i want to quit this all
and become an accountant now
but I'm no good at math
and besides the dollar is down

shipley, i figure if anyone on ilx cares about this tour it will be you

http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1611339/20090513/blink_182.jhtml

i'm like, head over heels and i don't even care about weezer

yeah that's kinda dope -- i don't know if i'd go see any of those bands on their own but as a triple bill could be awesome. thought about seeing FOB when they were here last month, but them + 50 Cent and a bunch of Decaydance flunkies seemed like a drag.

"Coffee's For Closers" = prolly my most listened to song of the past couple months

so i guess this was a demo on their mixtape and is now gonna be on their greatest hits? much <3 in any event

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51rVl0bulAQ

this album!

it's so great, right? feel like I don't listen to this album enough

I didn't give AFI enough credit on this thread.

i like Infinity On High but i've barely listened to it since Folie a Deux was released

listening to "Sugar, We're Goin Down" -- ostensibly 'hated' this shit when it was ubiquitous, but maannnn this is a jam

pre-chorus slays

i'm now going to listen to folie a deux tonight

honestly, out of every album i've ever repped for to my friends, this is the one where people were just like "nahh... you're bullshitting"

really? i've had a much easier time selling friends on FOB than most other corporate rock i listen to

idk i think there's an element for ppl my age of where FOB is sort of ghettoized as the 'emo' of our high school years & there is this distorted view of the music they make because of that, like they sound like panic at the disco or something

they're not really punk enough to still get burn like blink 182 or something

(know i'm mashing eras a little here)

(also i know this might be a bit too 'in my world of young people')

one of my pals from college who's into music was completely incredulous when i told him id been listening to taylor swift

the look he gave me was lol & reminded me everyone doesn't read ilx

nah but my friends are generally really open to pop & what not (altho t swift might give them pass)

like they sound like panic at the disco or something

Oh but the second Panic at the Disco record is completely excellent, for a lot of the same reasons that the singer's cameo on "20 Dollar Nose Bleed" works so well.

folie a deux is pretty good! you can hear that they're running out of ideas though. a lot of the hooks seem to have been reworked from infinity on high. (nb I am not familiar with their work previous IoH so maybe it's just something they do).

"preach electric to the microphone stand" is a pretty good lyric imo.

On the waiting list at my local library to get a copy of Save Rock and Roll, after seeing all the excitement and activity on that thread. I checked this one out instead for investigative purposes and I've been listening to it about once a week. I like parts of it, but don't quite have the hang of it. There's something about them that vaguely reminds me of Motley Crue, in a weird emo-pop way.

^last sentence one of the dumbest things I've said about music lately.

pffft you're not wrong

yeah for real

At the risk of stating something very obvious, the hamfistedness is a large part of the appeal, right?

i'm a crossover emo fan, i don't even recognize the hamfistedness anymore, but sure

i mean i feel like stump's compositions aren't hamfisted at all, even at this point when there are still traces of pop-punk they move around smartly, which pairs complexly with wentz's unconscious-yet-self-conscious lyrics

Ok, my knowledge of emo is very, very limited, but say with Saves The Day (first three albums is all I know), sometimes they'll hit a real clunker of a lyric, and I'm like "ok, that was bad, but they were really earnest about it. Dude's a mixed-up kid and he's trying to express his feelings." But with Fall Out Boy, I feel like they throw in the corny, hackneyed, awkward stuff knowingly and they're staring into my eyes while they're doing it. Or maybe they are really that corny. I don't know. It makes me like it more though.

I'll have to dig up some examples of what I'm talking about when I'm not at work.

Yeah Wentz lyrics are pretty defiantly on-the-nose and punny. Not exactly unique to emo, though, a lot of Elvis Costello lyrics (or insert respectable 'literate' songwriter here) function the same way.

costello comparison is actually otm

"I cast a spell over the west" bridge in doldrums is so fantastic. It's one of those things that has always stunned me when I heard it and then I go and forget about it and get thrown by it all over again the next time I make it around to that song. It's not letting me go today though.

best friend
ex friends til the end