Fear Factor.(Infinity on High by Fall Out Boy)(Sound recording review)

"Infinity on High," the new album by the Illinois rock band Fall Out Boy, debuted at No. 1 four weeks ago and has sold two hundred and sixty thousand copies, according to Nielsen SoundScan. The group's previous album, "From Under the Cork Tree" (2005), has sold 2.5 million copies. Few pop acts are currently selling millions of records, and hard-rock bands, once a staple of the American top ten, rarely figure in the upper reaches of the charts. The fact that Fall Out Boy is popular while playing what is, give or take a dozen influences, traditional guitar rock has to do in part with the band's universally catchy songs and in part with the star power of its eyeliner-wearing bassist and spokesman, Pete Wentz, who is also responsible for the group's exceedingly self-conscious lyrics. (Fall Out Boy is the main topic of Fall Out Boy songs.) The band--in addition to Wentz, it consists of three men in their twenties--is obsessed with being authentic, which, at least according to the group's songs, seems to be at odds with being successful. Fans are apparently familiar with this kind of identity crisis.

The band started, in 2002, as a fairly unremarkable example of emo--a descendant of punk rock in which political lyrics and noise have been exchanged for plaints about brokenhearted boys and their anonymous girlfriends--and evolved into a famous act that sings about the mechanics of celebrity. The group's second album, "Take This to Your Grave" (2003), appeared on an independent punk-rock label called Fueled by Ramen--the name refers to the marginal existences of touring bands--and the drummer, Andy Hurley, still claims to be a vegan anarchist. ("My whole thing is I'm not into civilization as a whole," he recently told Rolling Stone.) "From Under the Cork Tree" and "Infinity on High" were released by a major label, Island Records; the first song on "Infinity" is called "Thriller," after the biggest-selling album of all time. It begins with some cheerleading by the rapper Jay-Z, the C.E.O. of Def Jam, Island's sister label: "We dedicate this album to anybody people said couldn't make it. To the fans that held us down till everybody came around, welcome. It's here."

The album is deeply pleasurable, consisting of compressed, torqued-up rock songs that rarely detour into instrumental passages and return single-mindedly to choruses that range from the reasonably hummable to the eminently hummable. Like the band's other albums, "Infinity" is the product of an atypical division of labor, between the husky blond guitarist and singer Patrick Stump, who composes the rapidly shifting, unabashedly melodic music (he's a fan of soul, and warms up for shows by singing Nat King Cole's version of "Almost Like Being in Love"), and Wentz, whose clever lyrics rely on pop-culture references. ("A Little Less 'Sixteen Candles,' a Little More 'Touch Me' " is the name of a song from "Cork Tree.") Many people who have never heard Fall Out Boy know that Wentz has been romantically linked with starlets like Michelle Trachtenberg and Lindsay Lohan, and that last year nude pictures that Wentz took of himself with his Sidekick made their way onto the Internet. Wentz spends almost as much time online as the band's fans do. As he said in a recent interview, "I blog pretty hard."

On "Infinity," the first lyrics that Stump sings are, well, about Fall Out Boy: "Last summer we took threes across the board, but by fall we were a cover story: 'Now in stores.' Make us poster boys for your scene, but we are not making an acceptance speech." (The only top-ten acts that talk about fame as much as Fall Out Boy does are rappers, although their take on selling records is less conflicted.) Fall Out Boy retains some formal connections to punk--the generally rapid tempos and distorted guitars will be familiar to anyone who has heard Green Day or ...