Folie A Deux

This is the brightest, breeziest, giddiest record Fall Out Boy have ever made.

The band have responded with their most stylistically hatstand-but-indisputably-best songs yet.

And while this all may sound suspiciously over-indulgent, the fact is these self-styled 'soft-core' rockers are fulfilling their own prophesy.

It's simply another sturdy album that plays up what Fall Out Boy does best: rocking the arena with barely a second to catch your breath.

Whether intentional or not, there's a certain glee to FOB's pop absurdity because their cheerfully careless genre-bending has no reverence: fitting all these sounds and jokes into a pop song is all a game and it's one listeners can share, whether they're playing spot-the-allusion or just succumbing to the sugary hooks clustered within one track.

This is a more sophisticated record that manages to keep intact the brash sensibility that helped attract all those fans in the first place.

Passionate, splashy, and ambitious, Folie isn't flawless by any stretch, but it's no folly either.

While Folie A Deux at times feels like the band are showing off the contents of their Rolodex, the album's standouts are so good that they will undoubtedly become standards for the band's live shows for years to come.

If the band could bring themselves to record with anything resembling subtlety, they might win over some skeptics. But they also might end up hanging with Lightspeed Champion. I suspect they'll take the trade-off.

In Fall Out Boy's world, tongue-in-cheek always trumps heart-on-sleeve. That's certainly the case on Folie à Deux, their most exuberantly cheeky release yet.

Folie A Deux is entertaining in moderate doses, like its predecessor "Infinity On High", where the band gleefully abandoned any last pretence to edginess.

Low-tune for a pop band, low-momentum for a rock band, they stand a chance of evoking bad Elvis Costello when they take you by surprise or emote on in the background.

But for all the steps forward, Folie a Deux also seems to contain a microchip for its own destruction.

Patrick Stump is an impassioned frontman, and shows what he can do on the ambitious, multi-segment WAMS, but there's only so much creativity he can wring out of this conventional rock.

Folie A Deux recalls the high-impact pop oof "Private Eyes"-era Hall & Oates, and that's preferable to sounding like Blink 182. [Jan 2008, p.104]

Folie A Deux is mostly a barrelling, hugely confident record that should see Fall Out Boy swiftly elevated into mainstream rock's premier league. [Jan 2009, p.112]

Whether or not this is enough to inspire acolytes the likes of which this writer had a first-hand audience with some three years ago remains to be seen, though Folie à Deux does look certain to satisfy fans' appetites as much as it may surprise and intrigue certain others.

This is a power-pop album released by the biggest Fall Out Boy-ish band working today, on a major label, but it’s also 50.4 minutes of Fall Out Boy music--an extended, incomprehensible and surprisingly marketable clamor, ambulance siren loud, of contradictory signifiers.

Though Folie a Deux is still riddled with problems (ending the disc with the Survivor-esque closer 'West Coast Smoker' makes for a somewhat hurried conclusion), it’s still a musical leap in the right direction for the band, as it adds just enough new elements to keep things interesting while not straying too far from the sound that made them big in the first place.