You Could Shine So Bright

Patrick Stump "Spotlight (Oh Nostalgia)"

I find it very easy to embrace the idea of post-Fall Out Boy Patrick Stump. He's very charming and talented, he has great taste and a huge amount of ambition. I want to like this guy's music and I think he has the potential to be a good pop artist outside of his old band. That said, I don't think he's there yet. His first EP has its moments, but for the most part it suffers because Stump seems so eager to play it straight and prove his legitimacy as a pop/R&B act that a lot of his personality gets lost in the gloss. Specifically, there is not enough tension in this music. Fall Out Boy worked because Stump's technically impressive, R&B-inflected voice was spitting out these verbose, snarky lyrics in the context of jumpy mall rock arrangements. (Truly, that band does not get enough credit for being as weird and distinct as they were.) Stump thrives when his voice is just slightly out of place, but too much of his EP puts his voice in its most expected musical context and it comes out sounding generic. This is frustrating because some of this material is right on the edge of being quite good. For example, "As Long As I Know I'm Getting Paid" could really be something if the lyrics were just a bit edgier and the arrangement wasn't so overworked and airless. It comes out sounding like a mildly experimental Maroon 5 song. If you watch him perform the song in this Rolling Stone acoustic session, it comes off much better. I think the difference is mainly in that the acoustic version implies a lot of musical ideas whereas the studio recording executes all of them in the most obvious way possible, leaving nothing to the imagination. "Spotlight (Oh Nostalgia)" is the one song on the EP I consider to be an unqualified success. It plays to all of Stump's strengths, giving him plenty of room to display his vocal chops in a catchy tune that allows for moments of bombastic rock while also providing some less likely dynamic shifts. It's a hybrid weirdo pop song, and it's exactly the sort of thing he should be doing. If Stump truly wants a place in mainstream pop, he's more likely to get it by embracing the tensions that make him interesting, not by making second-rate versions of the music he admires. Buy it from iTunes.