Fall Out Boy

About two weeks ago, Rey mentioned that his son Tryke had asked him to buy a ticket for the September 21 concert of Fall Out Boy (FOB) at the Araneta Coliseum in Quezon City. In fact, Tryke had been dropping hints about Fall Out Boy ever since he made the first request. Back then, Rey was not inclined to pay for such a ticket.

With Tryke's birthday coming up, Rey decided to finally give in and buy the ticket. Problem is, the Sept. 21 concert is fully booked and the only tickets available are for the Sept. 20 concert ... which Rey wouldn't want Tryke to attend because it is on a Thursday night and Tryke would still go to class Friday.

Rhoda, on the other hand, bought her son Raphael his ticket early August. Rey remembers that both of them planned to buy the FOB tickets at the same time... so now he's annoyed with himself for not buying the ticket when she did. After browsing around the net, I told him that tickets were sold as early as last half of July, so it's no wonder they're sold out. He told me pointing that out does not help him feel good about himself. Ha ha ha! Anyway, if Rey never gets hold of a ticket, he plans to buy Tryke a cellphone instead as the kid had been using an old model ever since he lost his new cellphone (Tryke's already lost 2 or 3 others, so Rey wasn't keen on buying him a replacement immediately).

Now, with all this talk about FOB, I got curious ... the band's obviously hot amongst the high school kids but the name is not familiar to me at all. After browsing on the net ... I realized why I'm not familiar with them - they're a pop punk rock band bordering on "emo". That's one genre where I only like about a quarter or less of the songs. A number of pop punk bands love "noise" ... and I'm not a fan of music where "noise" is prevalent and I can't find a bit of "melody" or "harmony". With pop punk songs, sometimes all I could hear are just noise. Some pop punk music have okay melodies, but the lyrics are juvenile ... and I don't mind the juvenile lyrics only if the sound accompanying it goes beyond "okay" (nice guitar work, or awesome beat on the drums is always a plus).

To give you an idea, here's a few songs of the genre I like: Simple Plan's "Perfect" does not have that great a music but I like/remember it because it has nice lyrics... and the accompaniment allowed the lyrics to stand out. Blink 182's "All the Small Things" has juvenile (okay, maybe not that juvenile) lyrics, but its combination of beat and chord work works for me. Green Day's "Wake Me Up When September Ends" has nice, even poetic, lyrics accompanied by guitar and drum work that start out slow and simple then adds more chords/beats with each round as the song crescendoes (and gets faster and louder as well) to an "instrumental" segment then pauses before going into the denouement of the final stanza that repeats the simple to "ornamented" progression of the guitar and drum work.

Back to FOB. After listening to some of their songs from their official website, I find that their music isn't that "noisy". It's something I could nod my head to. However, based on the selected clips available for listening, none of them would be something I'd really hum afterwards. "This Ain't a Scene, It's an Arms Race" definitely stood out as it is one of the songs that do not conform to their generic sound. I say generic because after a few minutes of checking out their audio files, I've realized half of them sound the same. After I've checked all the music on that site, I still haven't heard anything that I remember hearing before.

Next stop on that site? Looking up their photos. Bingo ... the faces are familiar and yes, I've seen their music videos before! I guess I'm not really into their music because I find their faces more memorable than their songs.

I'm thinking that what makes them one of the hottest bands today are the lyrics. The lyrics, and even the titles are actually well thought out. Their words will indeed resonate with teenagers and young adults ... people that are in the phase of actively questioning the social, political and whatever structure they see around them ... which is what rock is mostly about, actually.