Fall Out Boy - Take This To Your Grave

The name Fall Out Boy just reeks of pop-punk and, surprise, that's exactly what Fall Out Boy is -- nothing more, nothing less. The quartet composed of Peter Wentz, Andrew Hurley, Patrick Stump, and Joseph Trohman (they actually put all their names on the album cover) write the same generic crap that defines the sound of every Drive-Thru Records act. I’m actually a little surprised that Drive-Thru didn’t jump on these 18-19 year-old kids from Illinois before Fueled By Ramen picked them up. But, nevertheless, this kind of shit is just getting annoying. Take This to Your Grave starts out with a halfway decent song sporting a homoerotic title, “Tell That Mick He Just Made My List of Things to do Today”, (ok, you can stop laughing now) but the album goes downhill from there until it reaches the only other tolerable track, “The Pros and Cons of Breathing”. All the other songs sound like other bands, and Fall Out Boy writes the same hackneyed lyrics that the rest of their peers write. Is there an unwritten law these days that pop-punk bands can only write about growing up and girls? The only thing that slightly sets them apart are the sporadic hints of violence tucked into their lyrics. For example, “His smile’s your rope, wrap it tight around your throat,” but that certainly isn’t redeeming or cool. And what’s with talking about burning bridges and hearts on your sleeve these days? Or putting back up screams on pop-punk records? Fall Out Boy has taken all of the most annoying things about that whole scene and crammed them all into Take This to Your Grave. The only positive thing that I can say about this record is that it's catchy, but that’s what pop punk is anyway. Also, the singer has slightly more range than the typical pop-punker. Everything else is completely unoriginal and void of any artistic integrity. Even the disc itself is a rip-off; at a glance it looks exactly like Glassjaw’s Worship and Tribute. Hopefully these guys can grow up and write something that people out of high school can actually take seriously. If not, they'll still have an audience with the 14 year-old “punk-rock” kids decked out in Hurley shirts and brand new Converse All-Stars. I'm not sure what exactly these boys fell out of, but it certainly wasn't the talent wagon. [www.falloutboyrock.com]