Fall Out Boy - "The (Shipped) Gold Standard"

Finally a bit of humanity.

Fall Out Boy honestly is (or was, seeing as how they might be broken up) one of the most unfairly maligned bands around. Sure, they have a resident douchewagon in the form of lyricist Pete Wentz and visually they represent the worst sort of musical commercialism, but they have a wonderful, honest to God blue-eyed soul singer in Patrick Stump and one of the most eclectic and engaging songwriting ensembles on the planet.

Folie A Deux, quite possibly the band's last album, saw them leaping into the deep end, and, frankly, there was no better place for them to be. Such outsized personalities and insistent voices needed an outsized sound. The album gleefully pulls influences and sounds from the last 35 years of album rock, whether fashionable or not, and fuses them into a very strange, very compelling whole.

From this fusion comes one of the album's highlights, "The (Shipped) Gold Standard." Fall Out Boy's way with a hook is immediate from the outset, with an insistent guitar line buoyed by strings. Some of the schizophrenia hanging over Folie A Deux becomes apparent in the way Fall Out Boy "do" funk during the verse. Shit, the breakdown of this song wouldn't sound out of place on a Michael Jackson record (something unintentionally underlined by their cover of "Beat It" a few years back). In the context of this album's musical grab-bag, however, it makes perfect sense.

The chorus is vintage Fall Out Boy, and probably one of the most addictive they've ever come up with. And from the diabetes-inducing sugar rush of their back catalogue, that's saying something. Hate Fall Out Boy or love them, but the fact remains they know their way around a naggingly catchy piece of music.

But what really lifts this song are the startlingly breezy lyrics. It's as if Pete Wentz was partially possessed by Alex Turner of the Arctic Monkeys. It's a character sketch instead of a caricature. It's melancholy without being so suicidally miserable and humorous without being mean spirited. It also has the cleverest line he's ever written; "The time my dad caught me a horseshoe crab / and I asked if throwing it back into the sea would bring our luck back."

It's refreshing, to say the very least. For once, Stump's (overly) passionate vocals are completely and utterly at home with WHAT he's singing. And you have to admit it's also a bit satisfying to hear such a terminal miserablist finally admit to himself, "You can only blame your problems on the world for so long / Before it all becomes the same old song."

Way to finally follow your own advice man.

If this indeed is Fall Out Boy's last hurrah, I really couldn't think of a more fitting epitaph.

"Get new passports and get get get get get out now."