PropertyOfZack Review : : Patrick Stump
Historically, when singers of wildly popular bands have stepped out from the acts that made them famous, success has been all but guaranteed, even if that singer wasn’t the driving musical force. Call it the Rod Stewart phenomenon. But Fall Out Boy aren’t exactly your typical band. While Patrick Stump may have been the guy behind the mic, bassist Pete Wentz was in most people’s minds, including those of much of Fall Out Boy’s highly-dedicated fanbase, the band’s ostensible frontman, or at least its public face. But while popular perception placed Pete Wentz at the heart of Fall Out Boy’s creative process, it becomes quickly apparent listening to Soul Punk just how integral Stump was to their sound, especially as that band’s sound grew to match their arena-sized ambitions. Soul Punk operates in a different sonic space than did Fall Out Boy, it has a different locus of influences, but there are myriad common threads to be followed from one to the next; there’s nothing about this progression that feels unnatural, and fans of Fall Out Boy’s Folie A Deux should feel right at home amidst Soul Punk’s outsized hooks and unrestrained bravado.
To be sure, Stump’s vocals-full-throated and unhindered, smooth with deep soulful tones, often ululating wildly just on the edge of control but never crossing that line-are the clearest link between the band and his solo work. But Soul Punk finds Stump lots of opportunities to toy with new vocal possibilities. The opening verses of “The ‘I’ In Lie” and “Allie” find him affecting a Prince-ly falsetto; “Dance Miserable” is full of New Jack Swing-style harmonies. There’s a moment in “Cryptozoology” when Stump hisses “Some days I may express myself in curious ways” that makes for a startlingly perfect Rick James impression.
But it’s Stump’s lyrical bent on Soul Punk that really breaks new ground. In Fall Out Boy, Stump often served as a sort of librarian for Wentz’s stray thoughts, cataloging and organizing his bandmate’s deeply personal revelations and singular turns of phrase. There was a sort of clubbiness to the Fall Out Boy approach: to be a fan was to be a member of the team (albeit a team which anyone was welcome to walk on), a soldier in the Clandestine-cloaked army of Overcast Kids with lyrics for marching cadences. On Soul Punk, Stump takes a much more universalist tack, repeatedly invoking the sort of broad-brush we-isms of Sly Stone and Marvin Gaye and large swaths of the 70s soul music he clearly holds dear. If Fall Out Boy were “us against the world,” Soul Punk is a little more “We Are The World”
Like those soul pioneers, Soul Punk finds Stump taking sharp moral and political stances, much more so than he ever did in Fall Out Boy; one of the benefits of recording solo is never having to worry about stepping on someone else’s toes, and Stump seems to find freedom in only having to speak for himself. “Greed,” with its “pop your while collars up // pop your white collars up” breakdown, drops perfectly into sync with our Occupy Wall Street times, as does “Dance Miserable,” with its instructions to “dance as if you’re disappointed in the world” lain over the top of a defeated voice chanting “unemployed // foreclosed // uninsured.” It’s a style of pop lyric that really hasn’t been in vogue since the days of Stevie Wonder’s “Living For The City” and Grandmaster Flash’s “The Message”; with the current economic times perhaps more closely resembling the late 70s/early 80s than any period since, it’s a natural return. At one point in “Coast (It’s Gonna Get Better),” an exceedingly hopeful self-directed pep talk , Stump sings “It’s gonna get better before it gets worse.” Even when he’s trying to assuage himself, that little bit of cognitive dissonance creeps in. These times are pervasive it seems; it’s to Stump’s credit that he lets them flow through him to such a degree.
If Soul Punk has a very specific set of lyrical influences, it’s musically all over the map, from the skittering synths and handclaps at the very first seconds of album-opener “Explode” to the radio pop background vocals of closer “Coast.” In between, Stump takes advantage of the full sonic playground, ping-ponging willy-nilly between influences. “Allie” crosses Deep Purple with the Purple One, its heavy metal intro giving way to a verse straight from the Prince playbook; tack on a 70s soul-classicist chorus that could have been swiped from a long-lost Harold Melvin and the Bluenotes tune, and somehow the whole thing feels almost natural. Indeed, if there’s a particular genius to Soul Punk, it’s in Stump’s seamless melding of sounds that just shouldn’t work on paper.
Soul Punk’s centerpiece is a pair of tracks, “Run Dry (X Heart X Fingers)” and “Cryptozoology,” that Stump has stitched into one. “Run Dry” turns an alcoholic’s struggles into a gloriously boisterous party anthem via some inspired, purposeful juxtaposition; “Cryptozoology” is a blistering homage to Morris Day and the Time (who in some sense might be OG soul punks), an electric funk jam that finds Stump firing staccato bursts of bitter invective, the sort he hasn’t loosed since mid-period Fall Out Boy b-side “Snitches and Talkers Get Stitches and Walkers”. Together, the Siamese-twin tracks are alternately aggressive, adventurous, honest, moralistic, buoyant, groovy and catchy as hell. They make for a perfect summary of everything distinctive and great about Soul Punk. This is as fine, and as fully-realized, an album as Stump has made to date, and that’s saying something.
★★★★.5/★★★★★
This review was composed by Jesse Richman
source
To be sure, Stump’s vocals-full-throated and unhindered, smooth with deep soulful tones, often ululating wildly just on the edge of control but never crossing that line-are the clearest link between the band and his solo work. But Soul Punk finds Stump lots of opportunities to toy with new vocal possibilities. The opening verses of “The ‘I’ In Lie” and “Allie” find him affecting a Prince-ly falsetto; “Dance Miserable” is full of New Jack Swing-style harmonies. There’s a moment in “Cryptozoology” when Stump hisses “Some days I may express myself in curious ways” that makes for a startlingly perfect Rick James impression.
But it’s Stump’s lyrical bent on Soul Punk that really breaks new ground. In Fall Out Boy, Stump often served as a sort of librarian for Wentz’s stray thoughts, cataloging and organizing his bandmate’s deeply personal revelations and singular turns of phrase. There was a sort of clubbiness to the Fall Out Boy approach: to be a fan was to be a member of the team (albeit a team which anyone was welcome to walk on), a soldier in the Clandestine-cloaked army of Overcast Kids with lyrics for marching cadences. On Soul Punk, Stump takes a much more universalist tack, repeatedly invoking the sort of broad-brush we-isms of Sly Stone and Marvin Gaye and large swaths of the 70s soul music he clearly holds dear. If Fall Out Boy were “us against the world,” Soul Punk is a little more “We Are The World”
Like those soul pioneers, Soul Punk finds Stump taking sharp moral and political stances, much more so than he ever did in Fall Out Boy; one of the benefits of recording solo is never having to worry about stepping on someone else’s toes, and Stump seems to find freedom in only having to speak for himself. “Greed,” with its “pop your while collars up // pop your white collars up” breakdown, drops perfectly into sync with our Occupy Wall Street times, as does “Dance Miserable,” with its instructions to “dance as if you’re disappointed in the world” lain over the top of a defeated voice chanting “unemployed // foreclosed // uninsured.” It’s a style of pop lyric that really hasn’t been in vogue since the days of Stevie Wonder’s “Living For The City” and Grandmaster Flash’s “The Message”; with the current economic times perhaps more closely resembling the late 70s/early 80s than any period since, it’s a natural return. At one point in “Coast (It’s Gonna Get Better),” an exceedingly hopeful self-directed pep talk , Stump sings “It’s gonna get better before it gets worse.” Even when he’s trying to assuage himself, that little bit of cognitive dissonance creeps in. These times are pervasive it seems; it’s to Stump’s credit that he lets them flow through him to such a degree.
If Soul Punk has a very specific set of lyrical influences, it’s musically all over the map, from the skittering synths and handclaps at the very first seconds of album-opener “Explode” to the radio pop background vocals of closer “Coast.” In between, Stump takes advantage of the full sonic playground, ping-ponging willy-nilly between influences. “Allie” crosses Deep Purple with the Purple One, its heavy metal intro giving way to a verse straight from the Prince playbook; tack on a 70s soul-classicist chorus that could have been swiped from a long-lost Harold Melvin and the Bluenotes tune, and somehow the whole thing feels almost natural. Indeed, if there’s a particular genius to Soul Punk, it’s in Stump’s seamless melding of sounds that just shouldn’t work on paper.
Soul Punk’s centerpiece is a pair of tracks, “Run Dry (X Heart X Fingers)” and “Cryptozoology,” that Stump has stitched into one. “Run Dry” turns an alcoholic’s struggles into a gloriously boisterous party anthem via some inspired, purposeful juxtaposition; “Cryptozoology” is a blistering homage to Morris Day and the Time (who in some sense might be OG soul punks), an electric funk jam that finds Stump firing staccato bursts of bitter invective, the sort he hasn’t loosed since mid-period Fall Out Boy b-side “Snitches and Talkers Get Stitches and Walkers”. Together, the Siamese-twin tracks are alternately aggressive, adventurous, honest, moralistic, buoyant, groovy and catchy as hell. They make for a perfect summary of everything distinctive and great about Soul Punk. This is as fine, and as fully-realized, an album as Stump has made to date, and that’s saying something.
★★★★.5/★★★★★
This review was composed by Jesse Richman
source