Title: Young and Menace
Artist: Fall Out Boy
Record Label: Island Records
Release Date: April 27th, 2017
Rating:
In a tweet sent out Friday afternoon, Fall Out Boy told followers to “get lost in the chaos w/ “Young and Menace””, their first single for their upcoming album Mania, that’s set to drop this fall.
It seems like Fall Out Boy are the ones that are lost, with “Young and Menace” sounding less like the beautiful chaos they were going for and more like an amorphic blob of a club track that no DJ would dare to spin. Packed into the 4-minute song is a quote from a 17-year-old Britney Spears song, a reference to Motley Crue bassist Nikki Sixx, and strange pitch shifting in an even stranger chorus.
It sounds like three bad songs put together to make an even worse song.
The lyrics of “Young and Menace” fail to carry the dead weight of the songs instrumentation and can be summed up with the generic “I’ve been sad and alone for a long time” narrative, AKA the standard in most alternative music.
The only saving grace of “Young and Menace” is the songs music video, which attempts to shed light on the issue of child abuse and highlights how people use music as an escape from reality. The video succeeds in adding some semblance of form to a song where little is found.
I’m all in favor of when a band goes somewhere artistically they haven’t been before or tries to move their music in a new direction. That being said, “Young and Menace” doesn’t’ do either. It ends up sounding more like a shallow rebranding of Fall Out Boy to be more “current” than anything else.
They were really trying for that hit single with this one. Our only hope is that the rest of Mania doesn’t follow suit.