Flush with success, Fall Out Boy return with a catchy album about being young. Elsewhere, Zodiac amazes, Lily Allen charms, and the Mountain Goats rock live.
You've seen them on the cover of Rolling Stone. You've heard their new single in that Verizon commercial. Their name is Fall Out Boy, and they're not going away any time soon.
Fall Out Boy, Infinity on High (Island)
God, is it easy to hate these guys. They’re massively popular without having any trace of artistic credibility, they’re glossily photogenic, they’re hopelessly white and unhip, and their youthful obliviousness makes me feel both smug and painfully old. But once I actually tried the album, I found precedents to my own youthful obliviousness. Opening track addresses their unlikely success as squarely as “Serve the Servants” did on Nirvana’s In Utero – but these guys know not to complain because they realize how lucky they are. And so what follows is a suite of compact, very catchy songs that fluctuate between adorably dorky and admittedly strong – sometimes within the same track. Every single song contains at least one utterly terrible line sung with a sincerity Patrick Stump will eventually look back and cringe about and which lyricist (and resident pretty boy) Pete Wentz will hopefully outgrow. But in the annals of recent macho-leaning boy bands, Fall Out Boy are musically stronger than the Killers and tons nicer than Limp Bizkit. They should abandon short-story fiction, and I can only hope that the song that opens with musical-theater clichés is a joke and not a sign of their aspirations to be the new Meat Loaf. But snideness aside, facts are facts: The hooks are here, and so is a perfectly captured sense of being young, which (we should all remember) often goes hand-in-hand with being stupid and full of it. Wincing the Night Away is the much stronger artistic statement, but it doesn’t sound as great as this thing does.
Lily Allen, Alright, Still (Capitol)
In limited doses, Lily Allen comes across like the cute girl you meet at a party – she’s fun and flirty and she’s got a sense of humor and a brain to boot. But Alright, Still is a hits-plus-filler affair, and over its short running time, her adorably tart personality isn’t enough to lift the clunky moments. She’s a hoot when she mocks her ex on “Smile,” and she’s touching when she laments the body issues that plague young women like herself on the deceptively sunny “Everything’s Just Wonderful.” Because she’s British, she reminds me of a female Mike Skinner, vulgar and vulnerable all at once. Except Skinner’s diary entries are funny where hers are merely clever. Her pop sense is stronger, though – and unlike Skinner, even at her meanest she knows that, deep down, she’s really just adorable.
Money Mark, Brand New By Tomorrow (Brushfire Records)
Money Mark’s entire musical philosophy is summed up early on: “Melodies were meant to be free.” He loves his sweet little tunes, zeroing in on their hum-tastic qualities, their well-coifed instrumentation. But his melodies are almost too free – pop miniaturists have to be careful that their sonic truffles actually have a strong center to keep you from drifting off. So while everything here charms, only “Pick Up the Pieces” and “Black Butterfly” stick in the brain. The rest will catch you offguard if/when they show up on indie radio, but never when you listen hard.
Zodiac (Paramount Pictures/Warner Bros. Pictures)
What David Fincher has accomplished is to remind the audience why serial-killers scare us so deeply – it's that they can exist in the real world, that they creep among us and could strike at any moment. Much like United 93, Zodiac takes us back to a society's innocence before a horrible series of events changed people's mindset forever. The characters' obsession with the identity of the criminal is so believable because there haven't been three decades of mostly mediocre slasher horror films for them to all draw on. It feels new and terrible – it's scary and disturbing all over again. The acting across the board is terrific – faithful to the period without sinking into kitsch, restrained without being intentionally dull or "lifelike," and in the case of Jake Gyllenhaal, a real show of range that may even outdo his Brokeback Mountain performance. I never liked Seven because I thought Fincher spent too much time glorifying the sleazy world he'd conjured up, but this movie feels like a rethinking of an earlier film as dramatic as the later violence-is-bad Eastwood movies. (Tellingly, there are very few showy shots in the entire film.) I can always do without scenes of a beleaguered wife whining to her hard-working husband, but there's no question the movie agrees with her. Fincher is as obsessed as his characters are about the crime – the laying-out of the case is fascinatingly detailed but still riveting – but he's smart enough not to fall apart with them. This is a 159-minute treatise on the futility of obsession that never takes it easy on its characters – even when Gyllenhaal’s Robert Graysmith finally gets his wish to “uncover” the truth about the killer at the end of the film, he realizes how empty a dream it really was. It's absolutely tragic and utterly brilliant. I can't think of a crime drama I've loved so completely.
Into Great Silence (Zeitgeist Films)
I’d love to subject those who blanch at the mood-poem cinema of introspective works like The Brown Bunny, Old Joy, or The New World to director Philip Gröning’s demanding, almost wordless documentary about the inner workings of an ascetic monastery hidden in the French Alps. At almost three hours – it’s even longer than Zodiac – the film immerses you into the slow, hypnotic daily rituals of a severe religious life, and its austerity is part of its appeal. So is the film’s physical length – it's rare for a movie to stretch my patience to its limit and yet keep me engaged at the same time. By sheer force of his slow, deliberate pace, Gröning makes his audience readjust its temperament to the worldview of a select group of monks who live as simply as possible so as to become closer to God. It’s an unparalleled experience, but it’s one that’s also extraordinarily frustrating. Gröning has been given once-in-a-lifetime access to a very private group, but no amount of quiet observation of praying, incanting, gardening, and cooking can help us understand the religions mindset. The baffling question at the center of the movie that made us curious to take this ride remains unanswered even as we leave the theater: Who are these people?
The Mountain Goats (live at the El Rey, March 11)
Among the many jobs John Darnielle had while getting the Mountain Goats off the ground was rock critic, and part of that persona remains with him even now. Nerdy, literate, slightly socially awkward, Darnielle certainly isn’t your typical live performer, shaking and gyrating while haphazardly strumming his guitar and yelping his often emotion-drenched lyrics about childhood abuse and spiritual erosion. But he’s also warmer than your typical record reviewer. The darkness he examines in song so well hasn’t devoured him personally; he’s grateful, not bitter. That doesn’t keep him from being gnomic, of course, and on his finely-articulated albums sometimes his themes outrun his musicianship, creating smart story-songs that you wish worked purely as tunes. But on stage, helped immensely by drummer Jon Wurster’s aggressiveness, Darnielle gave his compositions a punishing vibrancy that his albums sometimes disregard in favor of a bookish elegance. No Mountain Goats record has moved me so thoroughly as 2002’s Tallahassee, but he’s never been less than honorable since then, and this final stop on his West Coast tour confirmed that album-for-album, the man writes several incarnations of good songs, even when he dips into performance-art theatrics to get them across. Fittingly, the show ended with “This Year,” one more Darnielle song about survival, perhaps his best. But certainly his warmest – and the sort of universal sentiment most bookish people are too maladjusted to ever conceive.
Consumables is a regular overview of popular culture.
