American Beauty/American Psycho is the sixth studio album by American rock band Fall Out Boy. The eleven track album was first preceded by the top 20 hit “Centuries”. While “Centuries” managed to become a moderately successful US radio song, it failed to differentiate their sound from their previous album’s (Save Rock and Roll) 4 singles, along with their other previous works. However, the title track of this album immediately gives us something we have never heard from the band, with a much more pop-rock sound than many of their other studio albums. From there, the track “The Kids Aren’t Alright” gives us a ballad, which is something not often heard from the group. However, the next track, and the album’s second single, “Uma Thurman”, sounds just different enough (due to a sample of the hit show The Munster’s theme used prominently throughout the song’s three and a half minute duration) from the first single off the album to be sent to radio, which already has success around the board already. Yet, the entire middle section of this album falls into a complete blur, with five of the eleven tracks sounding like an uncreative mesh of everything the band has crafted in the past.
Ironically, the only track that is able to get the band out of this slum is a cut off of the soundtrack of the animated hit movie Big Hero 6, “Immortals”. With only one track remaining after a recycled soundtrack song, you would expect this album to end off with a bang, right? Well, if you could feel the overwhelming amount of sarcasm in the previous sentence, you would be able to predict that the album instead decides to end off with “Twin Skeleton’s (Hotel in NYC)”, a track that cannot decide what it wants to be, and instead sounds like an analogy for the entire album: everything they always do.
Overall, while this album delivers a few solid rock tracks, that is it. It gives you nothing out of the box, nothing that is out of the band’s usual spectrum. It instead provides you with an over pacified album that fails to deliver any career defining hits. While fans of the band and the general public alike will most likely have this album on repeat for weeks to come, it seems unlikely that American Beauty/American Psycho will ever be a standout in the group’s always growing discography.
