CD Review: Fall Out Boy "Infinity On High"

I wish I wasn't listening to this, and I don't know why I am-- I think I read something interesting about this band somewhere-- but I can't remember what. Maybe it was something like one guy writes the lyrics and another one sings them-- like The Who-- but I might be wrong about that. I don’t' really care at this point, but this record is unlistenable. I'm going to listen to the whole thing, though, just out of some masochistic sense of something.

They are very young-- there are a lot of pictures of them on the little CD booklet-- I'd say barely 20. And they are very popular. It seems dangerous to call yourself "boy" in the name of your band. When you're playing at classic rock revival festivals 30 years from now, that's bound to be embarrassing. But I guess it worked out okay for Sonic Youth.

The good thing about listening to this, anyway, is that now I have a name to put with a type of music I might hear blasting annoyingly in bars, or out of a car, or on a movie soundtrack-- or a band that I happen to see on a show like "Conan"-- where the band members are all overacting, trying to really look like they are possessed by "rock." You always know that there probably is at least one guy in the band that just wants to say fuck it and stand still, but he's probably under contract to move back and forth and grimace with fake emotion.

And now I want to apologize to anyone who has happened to read this and for that reason has had their attention drawn to this band and their music and for that reason has had to suffer as much as I have while listening to this vomit-inducing compact disk.