Thursday night in Boston, Chicago emo rockers Fall Out Boy kicked off a brief North American club tour behind their upcoming new album, Folie à Deux (due Dec. 16), by playing exactly one track from the record.
Initially hyped as a chance for the quartet to preview new material, the show took a decidedly different direction as bassist Pete Wentz asked the audience for requests immediately following the one-two punch of “Thks Fr Th Mmrs” and “Thriller.” With hands in the air, the amped-up crowd was then treated to seven songs from 2003’s Take This To Your Grave, including “Dead on Arrival.”
But why did Fall Out Boy choose to play requests at a tiny club in Boston? Vocalist Patrick Stump indicated they wanted to keep things real. After flubbing the lyrics to “The Patron Saint of Liars and Fakes,” he quipped that while a lot of successful bands use teleprompters, “we try to remember shit.”
But Fall Out Boy’s overall performance was shaky at best. During “Carpal Tunnel Of Love,” Stump struggled to remember tales of “taking sour sips from life’s lush lips” and “throwing stones in a glass room,” as bass notes and power chords battled in a swamp of dissonance. Wentz, Stump, and guitarist Joe Trohman were playing in different keys, andthey had to abort the song after 30 seconds.
Even the hits sounded bad. The vocals were so quiet in the mix during “Sugar, We’re Goin Down” that the crowd, who were signing along, drowned out Stump’s own singing.
The onstage banter became the show’s high point. We learned that Stump typically doesn’t chat between songs because of a seemingly innocuous moment at an early show in a Milwaukee basement. He explained that, after doing an extended impersonation of baseball announcer Harry Caray, he subsequently felt “like a dorky kid,” and now Wentz does the talking.
As for that one song from the new album, the stage lights were turned off as Wentz, Stump, and Trohman jumped around the stage during “I Don’t Care,” the first single off Folie à Deux. The power-punk guitar gristle and screaming vocals made this tune one of the few bright spots of the evening. But hopefully the audience’s requests were a wake-up call for Fall Out Boy: It seems they’re better suited just playing their hits in over-sized arenas.
Set List:
“Thks Fr Th Mmrs”
“Thriller”
“Chicago is So Two Years Ago”
“The Patron Saint of Liars and Fakes”
“Grand Theft Autumn/Where is Your Boy”
“Dead on Arrival”
“I’m Like a Lawyer With the Way I’m Always Trying To Get You Off”
“Sugar We’re Goin Down”
“A Little Less ‘Sixteen Candles,’ A Little More ‘Touch Me'”
“Yule Shoot Your Eye Out”
“The Carpal Tunnel of Love” (scratched after 30 seconds)
“Homesick At Spacecamp”
“I Slept With Someone in Fall Out Boy And All I Got Was This Stupid Song Written About Me”
“Tell That Mick He Just Made My List Of Things To Do Today”
“I Don’t Care”
Encore:
“Nobody Puts Baby in The Corner”
“Growing Up”
“Dance, Dance”
“Saturday”
More photos after the jump! >>
Fall Out Boy / Photo by Tim Bugbee
Fall Out Boy / Photo by Tim Bugbee
Fall Out Boy / Photo by Tim Bugbee
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