Fall Out Boy – Uma Thurman
And here are all the remaining fans of Fall Out Boy who were alive in 1994…
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[4.67]
Jer Fairall: This ain’t a scene, it’s a loudness race.
[4]
Luisa Lopez: When I was sixteen I held stupidly and firmly to the belief that the kind of desire I felt in those days (goofy, unbridled) was the only kind, and would grow and change its shape as I did, filling new rooms without ever shrinking. Then again, last week my mother asked me, “If you could present yourself as one thing, what would it be?” and I said “Restrained.” It always felt like that, a jumprope tightened in both directions, the huge possibility of wanting and how embarrassing it was, an excess of emotion so strong that it was laughable. You know: teenage girls! They scream, they keep diaries, they cry forever. Even now at twenty-four, sometimes I take something perfectly nice and tear it in two. It feels like habit, this mania without irony. To that end, what a relief it is to hear a song where someone actually screams OH HELL YES! PUT YOUR VENOM IN ME! A comfort too, but mostly a relief: to be able to laugh at the silliness of it all, desire sculpted into a Munsters riff, while still licking your lips, even if — well, maybe because — it comes from the mouths of Fall Out Boy.
[9]
Thomas Inskeep: “She” might wanna “dance like Uma Thurman,” but it won’t be to this boring hand-clapping personality-free rocker.
[3]
Katherine St Asaph: Herman Munster? I hardly know ‘er! And I hardly knew it’d be coming, but Pete Wentz and Patrick Stump have somehow escaped their fates as tabloid douchebag with a no-hope side project and pop literato with another no-hope side project (though given the sounds of 2013 on, perhaps he was just before his time.) Now they’ve nearly reached their “Sugar, We’re Going Down” levels of popularity, which seems so unsurprising in retrospect; yet I’m still startled each time I’m accosted by “Centuries” turning its New Yorker sketch of a Suzanne Vega single into the loudest, stupidest, most trash-menacing cock-rock riff on radio. (And yet it isn’t even the stupidest treatment of “Tom’s Diner” this year.) Note that none of those adjectives involve being good; Fall Out Boy is simply no good when they’re to be taken seriously. Luckily “Uma Thurman” suffers none of those expectations. The track goes over over the top, the spring-loaded voice and the priapic piano stabs and the venom and perfume and “THE BLOOD, THE BLOOD!” in gonzo tone and top volume; the cultural references are slapped together like a grindhouse marathon, or rather like a 14-year-old boy’s idea of one. That sample wants so hard to be surf-rock, much like the sample in Pitbull’s “Back in Time” wants so hard to be suave. And much like Pitbull, nobody involved is under any pretensions that it’s going to succeed — which just leaves a dumb rush, a quick burn, a pyromaniac’s guilty pleasure.
[7]
Alfred Soto: Adam Levine everywhere I look, even in this Pepsi commercial. Pretty sure he has more au courant tastes than Patrick Stump though.
[2]
Jonathan Bradley: From its zenith as one of the 21st century’s most effective and efficient synthesizers of punk and pop, Fall Out Boy has transformed in its advanced years into a lurching Frankenstein’s monster of modern rock. Whether its due to restlessness or a genuine belief that guitar music should be forward-thinking and populist long after its proponents abandoned as quixotic any gesture towards innovation — this is, after all, a band that, with little irony, named an album Save Rock ‘n’ Roll. But Pete Wentz, whose ambition will only and always be outweighed by his sincerity, maintains his insistence that Fall Out Boy songs retain a natural affinity with dance beats and hip-hop rhythms and guest rappers and Patrick Stump’s blue-eyed soul vocals and spotlit cameos from Elton John or Elvis Costello — as if Limp Bizkit’s career or U2’s “Discotheque” had never happened. “Uma Thurman” is a strange and ungainly beast, assembled from surf-guitar riffs, spy-theme honks, Pulp Fiction references, and glam piano with a glammier beat, but in its shambolic determination to be something more than a relic of a genre’s brighter times, it discovers a bracing energy. This approach doesn’t always succeed — previous single “Centuries” is only fun live, and not even that can be said for the title track of current album American Beauty/American Psycho. But Fall Out Boy misses only because it’s still trying to hit, and there are few other bands in 2015 who would believe that rock need neither be dead nor, if animate, a zombie shambling out of the 1960s.
[7]
Micha Cavaseno: Wentz has devolved into bad hair metal level songwriting, and ever since rediscovering Thriller Stump just sounds like a failed Vegas diva. Stop these kids.
[1]
Edward Okulicz: As driving music for a terrible video game, this works. As a rock song, less so. The verses are more than fine, the surf guitar is delicious cheese, but the chorus is too clumsy even for Patrick Stump to elevate. It’s got more than enough ideas to rub together, but the mix rubs me slightly the wrong way.
[6]
Danilo Bortoli: Amazingly enough, the saddest part about this song is that the demographic at which it is aiming probably has no clue of Pulp Fiction‘s general existence.
[3]
Reader average: [5.66] (3 votes)