Recovery

How was Christmas for the LA Allens, you ask? It was exhilarating. It was exhausting. We loved it, we’re fairly pleased it’s over. We flew across the country, played video games with the boys in Alexandria, invented eggnog traditions with Cor’s mom and sister, prepared and devoured a mouth-watering turkey with Cor’s father, adored nieces and nephews with my family, visited the gravesite of my great great grandfather, watched “The Dark Knight” with Cor’s brother and dad, then flung ourselves at Reagan Airport around five in the morning.

Speaking of Reagan, I can’t even begin to tell you how narrowly we caught that plane. It was our own fault, we just left too late, and when we hit the check-in counter, a silver-haired lady curtly informed us that we “weren’t gonna make it.” We pouted and stomped our feet until they threw boarding passes at us and whispered, “If you’re not there in four minutes, you miss it.”

We sprinted. Full speed. The security people nearly clocked us in the face with their walkie-talkies as we skipped right to the front of the line, launched my laptop through the X-ray, and kept going. When we got to our gate and found it shut, I could feel our collective spirit being crushed. After all, it was the holidays, and getting a stand-by on another flight was unlikely, not to mention any such flight was only going to get us to Atlanta, where we’d have to roll the dice again. 

It was an awful feeling. Especially when we could see the plane sitting right there. 

In moments like these, running to the window and trying to signal the pilot of the plane didn’t seem that unreasonable, so that’s what I did. I didn’t wave my hands or scream, I just fell on my knees and locked eyes with them pleadingly. I was sure it wouldn’t work, but then again we were all pretty sure Christopher Columbus was going to sail off the edge of a flat world a couple of years ago. After about ten seconds, as Corelyn began walking away and I lowered my head in anguish, a radio crackled: “There’s two people out there. I see two people over there.” A moment later, an exhausted airport employee appeared from the business end of the boarding gate and let us in. They even sat us in business class. 

As we fell apart with joy in our seats, baffled at the ample leg room and cool blue leather, we realized we had just experienced a microcosm of life: you start out doomed due to your own failures, fight desperately to make up for them and fail, then find yourself in a paradise you don’t deserve thanks to someone else’s intervention. I’m not saying we had a Messianic pilot or anything, but reclining in seats we didn’t pay for after we were certain we had deservedly missed our plane was unmistakably a preview of entering Heaven; I think the Big Guy was playing out a little parable for us. If Heaven is anything like it felt to stretch our exhausted bodies out in business class, I recommend you live a clean life, dear reader.

Moving right along.

Christmas has made it possible for me to finally lay my hands on Fall Out Boy’s new CD, “Folie a Deux.” Many of you know my affections for this group, and their slave-like devotion to filler-less LPs and mammoth hooks. This new album is a quirky one, maybe a tad too much so for its own good, but it retains the essential quality of every single one of its ancestors: listener satisfaction. Nobody gives you that shiver from a great hook as consistently as Fall Out Boy, and I mean nobody. Their songcraft constantly displays discipline, self-awareness, smarts and hard work. I can’t sing enough praises for a band who never wastes your money or your time, nailing the essential ingredients but never getting stale. 

If you’re interested in this album, start out easy with “I Don’t Care.” It’s a self-consciously standard FOB track; there’s nothing wrong with it, and the chorus (cribbed from Kurt Cobain) has a wonderful wryness, but it’s a safe zone. The deliciously-titled “She’s My Winona” also plays it nice and easy, and the “Hell or glory” stanza is a genuinely stellar hook.

When you’re ready to play with the band’s sound a little more, give “Headfirst Slide Into Cooperstown on A Bad Bet” a try, a sinister recounting of an extramarital affair which cleverly hints that cheaters are invariably doomed to be cheated on. The verses ooze synthesizers in a dance-floor-destroying lock-step rhythm that puts regular club music to shame. Guitars roar to life in the chorus, as lead singer Stump sneers “Does your husband know the way that the sunshine gleams from your wedding band?” FOB lets the momentum build up until it’s almost unbearable, then wipes out everything except a piano, softly cooing, “I will never end up like him, [but] behind my back I already am.” As the song closes, the band finally releases the climax with a whirlwind of guitars and double-tracked vocals, wearing the song into exhaustion and letting it collapse gently on itself. Complete sonic and lyrical victory, one of the best songs the band has ever authored.

A simpler but similarly effective monster is born in “West Coast Smoker,” a surprisingly ferocious and scary track for a band whose reputation is built on winking self-consciousness. The lyrics in the verse are a jumble of contradictions, most of which are a little forgettable, but the chorus announces itself with a fist-pumping “Oh hell yes,” the cry of a man not happy, but victorious. As the rhythm section and the guitars assemble into an unstoppable, blinding flood, Stump screams, “Knock once for the father, twice for the son, three times for the holy ghost!” I’m not sure what it means, or perhaps I’m not sure what it means to them, but those words have a raw power that is increased by keeping them from rhyming. It’s quite a treat to hear Fall Out Boy undertake a dark, ominous track like this and succeed with room to spare. Subtle extensions of their range like this one are, to me, even more impressive than the louder experiments attempted elsewhere.

“20 Dollar Nose Bleed” is also a riot, setting a fun tone with a jaunty piano line through the verses that unleashes into an arena-rock singalong chorus, all of which might be a little standard were it not for the perfectly timed brass section that comes out swinging at the height of the refrain. Stump wisely shuts up and lets the monster he’s taken off the leash run some laps, the horns stabbing with thunderous effect and sending the listener into head-snapping frenzy. It’s these magic moments, where the momentum of a song suddenly ignites, that so few artists are able to consistently capture, because it requires the subtlest move in the right direction, the tiniest detail coming out just so, the straw that breaks the camel’s back and sends a thrill into the pit of your stomach. Fall Out Boy pound out moments like this so regularly it’s almost embarrassing for other bands. 

Although much is made of the increased presence of piano and synthesizer on “Folie a Deux,” the real surprise may actually be the lyrics. Bassist and official media whore Pete Wentz has been in charge of FOB’s lyrics for awhile, and he’s always been good at penning gut-punch phrases that are just barely not nonsense, but something more substantive happens here. Where Patrick Stump has routinely saved Wentz’s sad-sack moping with soaring melodies in the past, Wentz now returns the favor and elevates tracks like “Disloyal Order of Water Buffaloes” and “I Don’t Care” with lyrical flourishes whose absence would severely diminish their power. Crafty little one-liners like “I wanna scream ‘I love you’ from the top of my lungs, but I’m afraid that someone else will hear me” and “Free love on the street, but in the alley it ain’t that cheap” are finally clever enough to transcend their smirking nature and add something real to the mix. His understanding of how to construct poetry that conveys emotion through contradiction, while flowing and building to a head within the music surrounding it, is beginning to become formidable; truth be told, the only thing holding him back is his desire to talk exclusively about his ex-girlfriend. Wentz has never been dead weight for the band, but here he’s becoming an asset.

Moving along again.

I’ve managed to get some time in with “Fallout 3″ on the 360 and “Super Mario Galaxy” on the Wii, and both are stunners. The former conveys a post-apocalyptic world so tangible I can almost smell it as I walk around, and the story has been nothing short of gripping so far. The character animations are pathetically bad, which is a little surprising in this day and age, but what shocks me even more is that I don’t really care. I played a little of “Elders Scrolls IV: Oblivion,” a very similar game from the same studio that came out a few years back, and I never got into it, because the thing was just too damned big. I felt overwhelmed, I had too much freedom and I just wasn’t ready for it. This time around, they’ve done a better job of conveying that same largeness with a more visible through line, which makes me feel more comfortable straying off of it and wandering around. 

“Super Mario Galaxy” is finally the answer to “Super Mario 64,” which came out a long, long time ago. Never before this has the franchise challenged the quality level they established in their flagship N64 title, and man is it about time. Everything here is polished, professional and totally groundbreaking, taking “platforming” into 3-D space in a way I’ve never seen before. I’ve already encountered a dazzling array of challenges unlike anything I’ve ever done before, and I’m only at the tip of the iceberg. 

What amazes is me is how much this feels like old-school Mario. Even more than “Super Mario 64,” this game is a true-blue platformer in its soul–it just platforms in every direction instead of left to right. This kind of outside-the-box, original thinking is what makes Nintendo…well, Nintendo.