Fall Out Boy - From Under The Cork Tree
[Mercury]

Lurking around the post-rock, emo and pop/punk genres is where you will find Fall Out Boy, who boasts members from Wilmette, Glenview, Winnetka and Milwaukee. In the same vein as Mest they use hooks galore to reach out into the vast disgruntled teen market. ‘Dance, Dance’ displays a defiant and lovelorn nature to this rumbling and rhythmic outfit, via a bruising post rock offering that shies away from their slightly clichéd rock base.

The slow burning, yearning and slightly harrowing; ‘I’ve Got A Dark Alley And A Bad Idea That Says You Shouldn’t Shut Your Mouth’ parades with pride and passion, the band’s unforced bemusement and troubled nature. Refreshingly, it is shrouded in darkness and feeling, coming out through the tenor vocals of Patrick Stump and is delivered on a plate of hounding guitars. However, this breath of fresh air is immediately juxtaposed by a number plucked straight out of a high school rock yearbook; ‘7 Minutes In Heaven’.

This album tends to flit from being uncompromising and musically broad to cliched in an unfortunately swift time scale. One the whole, ‘From Under The Cork Tree’ is frustrating for the fact that it threatens, forcibly at times, to be pushing at musical boundaries with a degree of deftness, but does tend to rely on interludes of standard riffs to keep going.