Depressed housing markets as a metaphor for… oh, you mean the bird.
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[6.90]
Alfred Soto: “Remix/phoenix” gets my vote for the year’s most unexpected rhyme, and Patrick Stump’s yodel-shriek has the power to knock many hatchlings from nests worldwide. After the hysterics of “My Songs KNow What You Did in the Dark,” though, much closer to their tried-and-true than expected. It’s a comeback after all.
[6]
Iain Mew: The snatch of Shostakovich (as heard previously on songs by Plan B, Brown Eyed Girls and Peter Fox) here is interesting. Fall Out Boy put it in the foreground for far less of their song than any of the others. Bar a bit of gap filling in the middle it’s mostly only pushed forwards for the scene setting intro, and even then overlaid with bombastic drums. It’s like they’re using it to set a benchmark of high drama which they can surge past with everything else in the song, and they do so in style.
[8]
Brad Shoup: If it’s Shostakovich in a pop song, you know we’re gonna cover it. Pop stars are four-for-four in not fucking it up. To qualify that: the verses are pure fire, with Stump digging gravel and beating bars against the wall. The switch to disco for the chorus is change for change’s sake, and the titular rhyme is hacky. Still a major move, but Wentz has got to make a bass play soon.
[5]
Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: If the movie trailer orchestrated gallops come as a surprise, let me remind you that Fall Out Boy left subtlety behind two albums ago when they decided to craft synthetic sonic playgrounds. The studio-crafted landscapes on Infinity on High were places where Pete Wentz could flaunt his fatalist wordiness; on the superior follow-up Folie à Deux, he attempted worldliness too, grounding the surrounding musical bombast in real life ca. 2008. Now it’s 2013 and Yung FOB are here to Save Rock and Roll by being as bombastic as possible. “The Phoenix” is a song that would never fit through the door of a practice room, it’s a soundtrack rock jam, the aural equivalent of a set of action movie explosions, a ridiculous gleeful riot. What it lacks is a point.
[6]
Anthony Easton: If camp is an excess of vulgar feelings taken seriously, sometimes with ironic purpose — and if it does not require sexuality of any sort — this might be it.
[8]
Scott Mildenhall: Fall Out Boy appear to have inadvertently written a post-Lordi Eastern European Eurovision entry — strings, clumsy hook that sounds like it was written by a non-native English speaker and all. It’s what Shostakovich would have wanted. The problem with the last single was very much how the “vintage misery” might well have looked a little better on them, past tense, seven years ago — but while it remains hard to buy into here, it’s overtaken by the urgency of the thing, and it’s hard not to be carried along a little.
[7]
John Seroff: From that beginning promise of galloping strings and the thunder of bass drums, you can hear the gear teeth meshing and the chain tightening link on link, tension mounting as the chorus crests. Then? Not much really, more of the same guitar lick and nasal growl that got us here. It’s asif Stump and Company opened an octave too high and had nowhere left to go; I kept expecting “The Phoenix” to blaze but it mostly smolders. If they had kicked it up to 11, this coulda been an 8; at a height of 9, it’s only a 6.
[6]
Alex Ostroff: There’s a fine line between bluster and bombast, and while Wentz once lyrically undercut Fall Out Boy just short of the latter, “The Phoenix” ascends from ominous war drums to a delightful disco thump. Previous album openers warned us of records not worth the hearing we’d lose, forcefully rejected poster boy status, and self-deprecatingly insisted, “Nobody wants to hear you sing about tragedy.” The break’s over, but absent any hint of irony or knowing wink, it seems that Save Rock and Roll‘s title is utterly earnest. The mantle has finally been accepted, but these boys have always felt most like saviours when displaying their sincerity and self-loathing in equal measure.
[7]
Jonathan Bogart: Bombast for bombast’s sake don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that Patrick Stump falsetto. There’s a Queen-sized ambition at play here, but Wentz’s sense of humor remains more juvenile than impish, and all the howling turns to digital crackle at the upper ends.
[7]
Sonya Nicholson: How sincere are Fall Out Boy about all this gearing-up-for-battle-to-take-back-the-world stuff? Pete Wentz wrote, on tumblr: “we recorded [the album] in secret from the music industry, critics, and even our fans… these incantations are meant to conjure realness, to unlock whatever the rock and roll is inside each of you.” So, there you go. Armed with Patrick Stump’s carefully-guarded treasure trove of arena-rock melodies, a couple high-quality music videos, and the connections and goodwill to instantly sell out arenas, the conquering heroes have carefully and thoroughly plotted their return. After watching Blur and the Libertines (to name two) try to fumble their way back to a working relationship with every misstep not hidden from intense public scrutiny, I’d have chosen to do it this way too, and I’m not even all that inclined toward secrecy or obsessive over-planning. Anyway, the song is great.
[9]