Live review: Day 1 at Bamboozle Left

Buddy Nielsen of the New Jersey punk band Senses Fail was not altogether thrilled about the lineup at this year’s Bamboozle Left festival.

“It feels like we’re playing in a chocolate factory here, with all these bands looking like 7-Eleven candy,” Nielsen said. “What happened to this scene? It’s garbage.”

After that interlude, Senses Fail’s two guitarists promptly pointed their instruments skyward, kicked their feet up on the stage monitors and played dueling harmonized solos in the vein of Blue Oyster Cult. It just goes to show that what counts for modern punk rock today is anybody’s guess, and every stripe of it was on display at thisweekend’s installment of Bamboozle Left. The two-day festival at the Verizon Amphitheater in Irvine has further proved that today’s emo scene is less determined by the music than by the kind of person who listens to it, and be it grindcore, stoner rap or frothy disco, every permutation of teenage taste was up for spirited debate.

Album review: Fall Out Boy's 'Folie a Deux'

Fall Out Boy isn't one to thwart its fans or the fame machine. The band's fifth album, "Folie a Deux," is a pleasure bot of right-now pop, adroitly programmed with crunchy '80s melodies, emo's dark prowess and symphonies à la "Sgt. Pepper's." A little something for everyone, all of it played to the max.

"Folie a Deux" imagines itself in the stadium. "(Coffee's for Closers)" marches in, tattered but resplendent, and closes with a playful bounty of horns and a suite of strings. "Disloyal Order of Water Buffaloes" soars and struts with a newfound love for vocal harmonies and club bathroom graffiti such as "detox just to retox."

But for all the steps forward, "Folie a Deux" also seems to contain a microchip for its own destruction. Friends drop in, Debbie Harry, Elvis Costello, Lil Wayne, but they barely surface above the album's aesthetic gluttony. Pete Wentz's lyrics flit from celebrity snark -- "throw your cameras in the air and wave them like you just don't care" -- to inane lines possibly cribbed from a soap opera script: "Does your husband know how the sunshine gleams from your wedding band?" Some songs, like "Tiffany Blews," are meant to be vampy but suffocate instead. There are moments when the oxygen floods in -- like the Pharrell-assisted "w.a.m.s." which unexpectedly ends in stripped-down a cappella blues -- but they are all too rare.

It's not that FOB can't have grandiosity, but every stadium needs open air.

-- Margaret Wappler

Fall Out Boy
"Folie a Deux"
(Island Records)
Two and a half stars

Pete Wentz and Travis McCoy open art show at Gallery 1988

The ideas that Merlot and Sprite can give a man.

That was Travis McCoy's drink of choice when he crashed at Pete Wentz's house over the summer for a couple of weeks. In no time, he got Wentz hooked. "It sounds like it would be the worst thing," Wentz said, "but the combo is surprisingly good." And a creative catalyst to boot: During the course of those two weeks, the kohl-eyed bassist of Fall Out Boy and the frontman of the Gym Class Heroes collaborated on several pieces of graffiti-inspired, '80s-nostalgic art that they'll be showing at Gallery 1988: Los Angeles, opening Tuesday, with proceeds benefiting Invisible Children. Prints will cost around $200 to $250, with original pieces running approximately $300 to $3,000.

The bands have worked together before -- most notably, FOB singer-shredder Patrick Stump produced part of the Heroes' "The Quilt" -- but they traded one studio for another this time. The pair worked each night on canvas, paper and cardboard coated with acrylics, spray paint and adhesives, sometimes roughened with sandpaper, sometimes adorned with scrawls. Experiments happened, with mixed results. "I thought it would be cool to set rubber cement on fire," Wentz remembers. "But I almost lit up the entire rug instead." They weren't thinking about an art show or much of anything at all. "It's a conversation with Travis, a record of a time that won't exist again," Wentz said. "It was exciting to work with no end-goal."

Pop & Hiss welcomes Bronx Mowgli Wentz into this bright, cruel world

So, Pete Wentz and Ashlee Simpson have a new baby, and his name is exactly what you think it would be! The Fall Out Boy bassist and lyricist's first creative endeavor under a thousand syllables, Bronx Mowgli Wentz, came into this world Thursday night at 7 pounds, 11 ounces and a difficult middle school tenure scheduled for sometime around 2020. The 29-year-old Wentz and 24-year-old Simpson are reportedly doing just fine. Hopefully, we'll be able to catch a glimpse of the little Jungle Book hero at a future FNMTV taping.

-- August Brown

Photo by Nancy Ostertag/Getty Images