The Daily Spin, September 17
Fall Out Boy | Infinity On High
Welcome back to the Daily Spin, the series in which I review 365 albums during 2023.
Each album will be given a rating on a scale from 0 to 10. You can look at the entire set here. Additionally, you can check out a list of my favorite song from each album right here.
Album: Infinity On High (2007)
Artist: Fall Out Boy
Link:
Though Fall Out Boy are undeniably extremely talented, each time I revisit this album, I’m left feeling less like this is an album that follows through with what it says it wants to and more like an album that wants, at heart, to present the illusion of this vicious counterculture.
This is, of course, the fine line that a group like Fall Out Boy has to walk, especially as they did following the wild success of From Under The Cork Tree just two years earlier - and at the heart of it, a lot of this album is the things that the group does best, from the absurdly lengthy sound titles to the terrible punnery throughout to the walls of strong guitar work that were defining both for the pop-punk genre and Fall Out Boy as an artistic endeavor.
Around moments that are definitely the far side of corny, there’s a lot of heart evident in the core of this album, and I can’t degrade that too much, but it’s far too layered under a lot of faux-intrigue, the sort of stuff that by and large is designed to grasp for the camera without ever really presenting much of anything to the listener.
Rating: 7.6/10
Best Tracks: Thnks fr th Mmrs
Worst Tracks: I’ve Got All This Ringing In My Ears And None On My Fingers