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