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Fall Out Boy - Fall Out Boy’s Evening Out With Your Girlfriend

Fall Out Boy’s Evening Out With Your Girlfriend

If you weren’t already convinced that Fall Out Boy frontman Patrick Stump could belt out the ingredients on the back of a bag of Doritos and somehow make them into the catchiest little ditty ever, consider the fact that Stump, while still just a kid himself, almost even managed to save his band’s roughshod 2003 indie debut, the now-intentionally forgotten Fall Out Boy’s Evening Out With Your Girlfriend. Again, we say almost.

There’s little doubt the current members of FOB—Stump, bassist/lyricist Pete Wentz, guitarist Joe Trohman and drummer Andy Hurley (who joined FOB later, replacing original drummer Mike Pareskuwicz)—would love for Evening, the band’s first full-length, to disappear entirely, and you could hardly blame them (note: guitarist T.J. “Raccine” Kunasch played rhythm guitar on the record, but departed soon after). The album sounds more like a pack of amped-up scene kids let loose in someone’s basement studio for the first time, sloppily trying to cram every idea and influence into each available space, rather than a collection of actual organic songs, yet Stump’s ever-soulful tenor, even back then, is enough to make you try to endure it.

Diehard fans will appreciate Evening Out’s early version of “Calm Before The Storm,” a song that would later become a high point of FOB’s “official” debut, 2003’s Take This To Your Grave. The original version of “Storm” has some fairly different lyrics and rocks a noticeably slower tempo than the later version, but again, pales in comparison. Aside from serving as an occasional exercise in trivia, Evening is largely a record fans will buy and shelve almost immediately.

Uprising www.uprisingrecords.com

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