As a huge fan of technical and complex music, it's nice to sometimes sit back and just enjoy fun, catchy music. Despite not being a huge fan of any of the acts playing the Monumentor; I decided to go with a couple of my friends who are fans of both headliners (Fall Out Boy and Paramore) and ended up having a much better time than I anticipated.
Though the night was successful overall, it certainly did not start off that way. Opening band New Politics was a complete drag to sit through. The biggest takeaway I had from their set is that they need to fire their sound guy immediately. The only thing you could hear for most of their set was the vocals, a snare drum and bass- which was turned up to a ear-shattering level. The guitar was audible for maybe 10 seconds throughout the set. It's kind of odd to see a rock band with prominent guitars on their studio recordings choose to all but forgo them in their live performance. Despite the fact that there was no guitar in the mix, their guitarist changed guitars after almost every song. Fall Out Boy and Paramore didn't even have as many guitar changes as New Politics did and they've released much more material and feature guitarists that you could tell were actually plugged into amps. About the only redeeming thing about New Politics was their drummer. The few times the bass and vocals let up, he showed off some pretty damn impressive drumming. It's a shame that his talent was lost in the shuffle behind the suffocating bass and below average vocals. New Politics is a bland modern pop/rock band who will go down in the history as the band with the single worst sound mix I've ever heard out of the hundreds of bands I've seen in the nine years I've been going to shows.
Paramore,the first of the Monumentour's co-headliners to perform, were up next. My pop punk listening was at its peak when Paramore blew up with 2007's Riot!. Being so immersed in the scene at the time, I remember hearing stuff like "Misery Business" and "crushcrushcrush" and thinking that there was pretty much no way that they wouldn't become huge someday. Though Paramore's music has never consistently clicked with me, they do have a handful of songs in their discography that are really great. I had practically no expectations for their performance going so it surprised the hell out of me when Paramore came out and played a consistently engaging and energetic set. A lot of people would argue (and I don't entirely disagree) that the Farro brothers-who famously left the band with a lot of controversy in 2010- were the real masterminds behind Paramore's music, but Haley Williams is just as essential to Paramore's success. She has a huge voice that is perfectly suited for this type of music and a bubbly stage presence that you can't help but smile at. Paramore certainly took a huge blow when the Farro brothers left the band, but Williams is managing to keep them afloat with relative ease. The setlist was also a bit more adventurous than I expected as well with a pretty even split between their last three albums and a fair number of lesser-known tracks to compliment their plethora of smash singles. That being said a lot of their bigger tracks like "Ignorance", the aforementioned "Misery Business" , and above all, "Decode"- which was the best showcase of both Williams' vocal ability and the band's often overlooked guitarwork and drumming- were the highlights of the set. I'd probably never go out of my way to see Paramore again, but they are undeniably good performers with the musicality, energy and genuine passion for their craft that allows them to absolutely own any venue they perform in.
Fall Out Boy had the honor of closing out the evening. Unlike Paramore, Fall Out Boy was a band that I was pretty into at one point in time. I gave From Under the Cork Tree a solid number of spins in my middle school years and the idea of hearing some material from that record live was the main reason I decided to go to this show. I really didn't know what to expect from Fall Out Boy's set as had I heard mixed reviews of their live shows and I haven't really enjoyed a record they've made since From Under the Cork Tree. Any skepticism I had about Fall Out Boy as a live act was erased the minute they got on stage and burst into "The Phoenix". To be completely candid, I was actually taken back a bit by just how good Fall Out Boy was live. Unlike another iconic pop punk act (**cough cough blink-182 cough cough**) that went on a long hiatus, Fall Out Boy still has brilliant chemistry as a band. They're clearly having fun on-stage together and not just continuing to make music simply to get a paycheck. Fall Out Boy's ringleader, Patrick Stump, is a very interesting frontman as he doesn't really talk to the crowd much in-between songs (bassist Pete Wentz handles that duty) yet dominates the room when he's doing anything else on-stage. The break from Fall Out Boy seems to have really benefited Stump as a vocalist. In the past, he was known to be pretty sloppy with his vocals and would often slack off on certain notes in each song. Now Stump sounds damn near flawless on every track. His delivery is impassioned and he nails every note that is thrown at him for the duration of the set. Perhaps the most surprising thing about my immense enjoyment of Fall Out's Boy performance is the fact that the setlist was primarily focused on material from their 2013 comeback album Save Rock and Roll; which I found to be a wildly uneven record. A majority of the material was far more energetic and a lot of the hooks were really massive and infectious when put into a live setting. The more rock/punk-oriented sound of Fall Out Boy definitely appeals to me more, but there's no denying that these guys have a knack for crafting straight-up pop music. While the Save Rock and Roll material was surprisingly effective live, the older material was still easily my favorite part of the show. There were no real surprises as to what was played, but it was still great to see nonetheless. "Dance, Dance" and "Sugar, We're Going Down" had the strongest crowd sing-a-longs of the night while my all-time favorite Fall Out Boy song "A Little Less Sixteen Candles, A Little More "Touch Me" was every bit as glorious as I expected it to be. I would've loved to have seen a couple of songs from Save Rock and Roll swamped out for some additional cuts from From Under the Cork Tree, but that's a relatively minor complaint in the grand scheme of the performance. Fall Out Boy put on one of the most pure fun performances I've ever seen and are right up there with My Chemical Romance as the best live pop punk act of their era.
Side notes:
-I'm fairly certain that I was one of the oldest people in attendance that wasn't a parent. An overwhelming majority of the crowd was between the ages of 13-18.
-Trinidad James' "All Gold Everything" was played not once, but twice over the PA in-between songs.
-The biggest WTF moment of the night was when these two girls wearing Viking helmets walked in front of my seats during New Politics. Since this wasn't an Amon Amarth show, I was deeply confused by the presence of these helmets.
-Paramore had confetti and/or streamers drop five times during their set. There was so much confetti in the venue that some of it was still floating around after Fall Out Boy had wrapped up their set.
-It really pissed me off that Paramore had their three touring band members essentially buried behind them. The three current "real" members of the band were in the front of the stage while the other the touring musicians (two guitarists and a drummer) were put on top of their lightboard backdrop. This may seem like a nitpicky complaint, it's just that I don't like to see a band make it seem like the touring musicians are inferior to the permanent members.
-It's comical to see ex-Underoath drummer Aaron Gillespie drumming in Paramore now. Never would've guessed this would've been in the cards after he left Underoath in early 2010.
-Fall Out Boy had a pretty sweet drum solo duel between Stump and Andy Hurley about halfway through the set. The "Raining Blood" intro played prior to Hurley's first part of the solo was a nice ode to his metal roots.
-Fall Out Boy was about to hit curfew, so they couldn't leave the stage for their planned two song encore and just played straight through. They managed to finish ahead of the Xfinity Center's 11:00 curfew with only seconds to spare.
Scores:
New Politics 3/10
Paramore 7.5/10
Fall Out Boy 8.5/10
Setlists:
New Politics (jacked from setlist.fm):
Give Me Hope
Berlin
Fall into These Arms
Break Dance
Just Like Me
Tonight You're Perfect
Harlem
Yeah Yeah Yeah
Paramore:
Still Into You
That's What You Get
For A Pessimist, I'm Pretty Optimistic
Ignorance
Pressure
Decode
The Only Exception
Last Hope
Born for This
Misery Business
Let the Flames Begin
Part II
Proof
Ain't it Fun
Fall Out Boy:
The Phoenix
The Take Over, the Breaks Over
A Little Less Sixteen Candles, A Little More "Touch Me"
This Ain't a Scene, It's an Arms Race
Alone Together
Death Valley
Sugar, We're Going Down
Miss Missing You
Dueling Drum Solo (Patrick and Andy)
Dance, Dance
Young Volcanoes
Just One Yesterday
Grand Theft Autumn/Where Is Your Boy
We are the Champions (Queen cover, first verse and chorus only)
Save Rock and Roll
I Don't Care
My Songs Know What You Did in the Dark (Light Em' Up)
Thanks fr the Mmrs
Saturday
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