The Singles Jukebox

*sets out lobster trap in comments for all remaining LOST fans*

[Video]
[5.78]

Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: [The following passage adapts dialogue excerpts from the Lost episode “The Hunting Party”, aired 18^th January 2006, written by Elisabeth Sarnoff and Christina M Kim.] WENTZ: Oooo, 1172 days. That’s what — almost 3 whole years, huh? Tell me, you go over a man’s house for the first time, do you take off your shoes? Do you put your feet up on his coffee table? Do you walk in the kitchen, eat food that doesn’t belong to you? [He looks at the gathered legion of post-Fall Out Boybands, all of them unable to manage the back-and-forth between blunt-force/proto-trollgaze artistic statements and a poptimist’s sweet tooth for melodious songcraft. Some of them didn’t even like Folie a Deux, THE DAMNED FOOLS.] This is not your island. This is our island. And the only reason you’re living on it is because we let you live on it. [Wentz raises his arms aloft and bellows to the heavens, Jesus Christ Saviour pose intended to rankle the gathered non-believers.] LIGHT ‘EM UP! [Torches light up and Wentz’s fellow Others walk out to make the gloriously over-the-top statement more palatable. They’re baaaaaaack.]
[9]

Scott Mildenhall: Rock is back! Well, Fall Out Boy are, to be precise, like a spectre at David Guetta’s feast. They died for his sins. They know what he did in the dark with Flo Rida, LMFAO and Akon et al — we all do — and they’re here to make us pay. They try, anyway. See, this doesn’t sound like the Fall Out Boy of “Sugar, We’re Goin’ Down.” Whether or not the angst of songs like that was an affectation, it didn’t sound it, whereas here we have four successful men either in or approaching their 30s trying to still sound angry at something — anything — and failing. To extend that laboured and frankly shonky Shakespeare metaphor, this song is more Macduff than Macbeth. (A duff, that is.)
[4]

Brad Shoup: Fall Out Boy never quite reconciled with large-scale stardom, even as they tried to play the game. The comeback cribs pretty heavily from Kanye’s 2010 playbook; if you want import beyond their standard metaphor set, it’s not a bad place to turn. Stump prolly hasn’t learned that his Jackson leanings should stay where Mike left them (in deeply paranoid pop/rock), but maybe an another album or two will convince him.
[7]

Anthony Easton: I love the woohoos in this, and I like how fun the “light ’em up” chorus is and how incriminating the idea of light as a temporary solution can be. But for such joyful aggression, the message is still a little unclear. 
[5]

Katherine St Asaph: Patrick and Pete and the rest have a toast to the assholes. And the scumbags, every one of them that I know, are going to relate to “my childhood spat back the monster that you see” and “I’m just dreaming of tearing you apart” and “my songs know what you did in the dark — so light ’em up! *lighter-holding fist pump*” in all the wrong ways. (Which is their right, fine — but there’s usually a girl on the other end.) That’d be extramusical if the intro didn’t sound so damn much like Kanye (try singing the “POWER” intro), but this’d be bombastic even for Ye: multitracked chants leading into a squeal-guitar, sneer-screeched arena blast that comes off like Lana Del Rey’s idea of subversive rawk (try thinking of “D-A-R-K, dark!“) That it’s probably self-aware doesn’t make anything here less unwieldy or ridiculous. Yet the thing towers, like an obelisk made entirely of burning rubbish: you question the motives, certainly the construction, but can’t help but admire the scope of the thing.
[6]

Jonathan Bradley: Fall Out Boy doesn’t make singles, it makes scenes. (Feel free to steal that one, Pete Wentz.) And “My Songs Know What You Did in the Dark” is a scene non pareil, from the wordless chanting of the intro, to the crashing guitar chords that punctuate the end of each line in the verse, to the igniting spark that interrupts “burn everything you love then burn the… ashes,” to the Axl Rose screech of “I’m on fiiii-yah” in the chorus. But vertiginous guitars can’t will a melody into existence, and in Fall Out Boy’s heyday, it was Patrick Stump’s melodies that had us paying the door charge. (OK, it was also Wentz’s gloriously ludicrous lyrics, but the tunes did a lot to accommodate the absurdity of those.) This is the kind of monstrosity you get at the endgame of an arms race.
[5]

Alfred Soto: From the clipped guitars to the booming drums and Italo disco eight times removed oh-oh-ohs, the music is paranoia personified, kin of Laura Branigan’s “Self Control” in the way a Hemings from Virginia in 2013 is to Jefferson. But it wears its paranoia rather proudly. Paranoia is more intense when it gets room to breathe.
[6]

Jer Fairall: Hair metal done with all of the wit and conviction of an asshole frat boy making devil horns to a Def Leppard song, but not even the Go! Team-like pep rally chant can rouse this out of its mirthless plod. Seriously guys, at least try to sound like you’re having a tenth of the fun that you expect your audience to be having.
[2]

Edward Okulicz: Effectively, this is “Thnks Fr Th Mmrs” with a lower production budget, but it kicks just as hard. Patrick Stump’s voice is never anything less than good, but it takes seething, spitting guitars for it to really be the huge weapon it is on Fall Out Boy’s best songs — and mall-punk is not usually a vehicle for really impassioned, huge singing, so the context makes the return even sweeter. Admittedly this isn’t even close to being one of Fall Out Boy’s best songs, but average-to-good FoB is still good-to-excellent pop.
[8]