Save Rock And Roll

About

For a band that hadn’t released an album in five year, having gone on hiatus following 2008’s <i>Folie à Deux</i>, the title of their fifth album was bold, divisive, and, importantly, tongue in cheek—qualities that had defined Fall Out Boy since forming in Chicago in 2001. <i>Save Rock and Roll</i> is not, however, the work of a group content to rest on their legacy. The cover art, featuring an image of a punk standing next to a monk, was chosen to represent the sound of the record, a symbolic meeting of the old and the new combining to create something fresh. And so while Joe Trohman’s guitars and the band’s trademark arena-filling emo-pop melodies remain intact, they’re only part of the puzzle, no longer the whole picture. Collaborations with artists such as rapper 2 Chainz (“My Songs Know What You Did in the Dark (Light Em Up)”), pop singer Foxes (the soul/R&B funk of “Just One Yesterday”), and Big Sean (“The Mighty Fall”) speak of a band looking to remain relevant in a music landscape that had changed dramatically during their absence. Elton John’s appearance on the title track, meanwhile, was a reminder of the company FOB was now keeping. And while the string-laden drama of opener “The Phoenix” bounces with typical guitar-charged adrenaline (albeit with a more shiny pop sheen courtesy of co-producer Butch Walker, who’d previously worked with P!nk and Katy Perry, among others), it’s balanced by “Miss Missing You,” a song drawn straight from The Human League’s ’80s synth-pop songbook. .

via Apple Music

The Clerk says

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