Historically, when singers of wildly popular bands have stepped out from the acts that made them famous, success has been all but guaranteed, even if that singer wasn’t the driving musical force. Call it the Rod Stewart phenomenon. But Fall Out Boy aren’t exactly your typical band. While Patrick Stump may have been the guy behind the mic, bassist Pete Wentz was in most people’s minds, including those of much of Fall Out Boy’s highly-dedicated fanbase, the band’s ostensible frontman, or at least its public face. But while popular perception placed Pete Wentz at the heart of Fall Out Boy’s creative process, it becomes quickly apparent listening to Soul Punk just how integral Stump was to their sound, especially as that band’s sound grew to match their arena-sized ambitions. Soul Punk operates in a different sonic space than did Fall Out Boy, it has a different locus of influences, but there are myriad common threads to be followed from one to the next; there’s nothing about this progression that feels unnatural, and fans of Fall Out Boy’s Folie A Deux should feel right at home amidst Soul Punk’s outsized hooks and unrestrained bravado.
To be sure, Stump’s vocals—full-throated and unhindered, smooth with deep soulful tones, often ululating wildly just on the edge of control but never crossing that line—are the clearest link between the band and his solo work. But Soul Punk finds Stump lots of opportunities to toy with new vocal possibilities. The opening verses of “The ‘I’ In Lie” and “Allie” find him affecting a Prince-ly falsetto; “Dance Miserable” is full of New Jack Swing-style harmonies. There’s a moment in “Cryptozoology” when Stump hisses “Some days I may express myself in curious ways” that makes for a startlingly perfect Rick James impression.
But it’s Stump’s lyrical bent on Soul Punk that really breaks new ground. In Fall Out Boy, Stump often served as a sort of librarian for Wentz’s stray thoughts, cataloging and organizing his bandmate’s deeply personal revelations and singular turns of phrase. There was a sort of clubbiness to the Fall Out Boy approach: to be a fan was to be a member of the team (albeit a team which anyone was welcome to walk on), a soldier in the Clandestine-cloaked army of Overcast Kids with lyrics for marching cadences. On Soul Punk, Stump takes a much more universalist tack, repeatedly invoking the sort of broad-brush we-isms of Sly Stone and Marvin Gaye and large swaths of the 70s soul music he clearly holds dear. If Fall Out Boy were “us against the world,” Soul Punk is a little more “We Are The World”
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