The career of Fall Out Boy is a long and storied one, but it is popularly agreed to have fallen off after their last album MANIA. Excessive experimentation and pop elements soured their emo/punk/rock following, and the band largely went silent for four years, lost to the annals of emo history. So when the first track on So Much (for) Stardust — “Love From The Other Side” — follows London Metropolitan Orchestra’s minute-long piano-to-orchestra-symphonic-rock intro with frontman Patrick Stump’s characteristically soulful lament, “We were a hammer to the state of David / We were a painting you could never frame and / You were the sunshine of my lifetime” The band seems keenly aware of their place in that history. They don’t dwell, however. As the constant drumbeat and guitar plucking drive the song forward, the band builds and layers into the title chorus and their mission statement: “Sending my love from the other side of the apocalypse!”
Whether the apocalypse they refer to is MANIA’s fallout or our more recent brushes with the end-times, love is what persists. Everything cuts out except for those now-isolated piano notes. As in the intro, the orchestra begins to swell in as Stump sings about this painful yet fulfilling relationship with a lover or with music: “I saw you in a bright clear field, hurricane heat in my head / The kind of pain you feel to get good in the end, good in the end.” The drums come back in, starting as cymbal taps crash into a drumroll as Stump repeats, then rejects, a mantra of the music industry: “Inscribed like stone and faded by the rain: ‘Give up what you love / Give up what you love before it does you in.’”
Stardust tells an apocalyptic love story as both the band’s traditional emo tales of heartbreak but also to honor and advance their own career. Returning to their Folie à Deux producer Neal Avron, it only takes the instrumental intros — varying from five to 30 seconds — of each song to determine the depth of the album’s variation, like the aforementioned orchestral introduction to the album, deep synths starting off “Heartbreak Feels so Good,” more ambient traditionally-emo instrumentation established in “Fake Out,” Joe Trohman’s grungier guitar riff ringing in “Flu Game” and the funky preface of “What a Time To Be Alive.” Some of these intros also pair tracks together: Andy Hurley’s percussive presentations of “Heaven, Iowa” and “The Kintsugi Kid (Ten Years),” Pete Wentz’s basslines with Hurley’s drum bangs bringing in “Hold Me Like a Grudge” and “So Good Right Now,” strings sending off “I Am My Own Muse” and the finale track “So Much (For) Stardust.” There’s also two spoken-word tracks, one sampling Ethan Hawke (“Training Day”) and the other performed by Wentz — Folie à Deux being the last time he performed such a track.
However, this artistic evolution and the almost-autoerotic esteeming clash with each other. It’s evident that Stump’s singing, Wentz’s lyrics and the band’s performance are being pushed as hard as they can, but the end product still leaves something to be desired. There are occasional bright spots that shine in Stardust, but “Love From the Other Side” is a high point that warrants the most analysis because the rest of the tracks rehash similar themes draped in the band’s usual theatrical poetry. They’re somehow too varied to feel cohesive yet too repetitive to feel dynamic. Fall Out Boy understands this contradiction, however, stemming from the album’s own title. So Much (for) Stardust is a simultaneous declaration and dismissal of wonder, or as Wentz terms it, “their dialectical record.” Stardust and star power — these things birth and elevate us, but star power will one day run out and to stardust we will return, whether it’s existence, amour or emo.
I wanted to love this album. I spent the past months relistening to every album and EP the band has ever released, discovering new tracks and reliving secondary school nostalgia. But sometimes, love alone can’t elevate the artistic value of an album — rose-tinted lenses are nice until you want to see the world back in full color. Still, through the band’s lamentations on love and loss framed through the apocalypse and their temporary emo end, it’s clear that they maintain their fondness for the fans. After “So Much (For) Stardust” reprises lyrics from “Love From the Other Side,” the album ends with the cry: “So we thought we had it all, thought we had it all.” This return isn’t perfect, but it might be a good revival for better things to come, though I still prefer “Grenade Jumper” for the band’s appreciative anthem. We know this is belated, but hey Fall Out Boy — we love you back.
Digital Culture Beat Editor Saarthak Johri can be reached at sjohri@umich.edu.