‘Folie a Deux’

‘Folie a Deux’

Fall Out Boy (Island Records)

Grade: B-

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 1980s melodies, emo’s dark prowess and symphonies a 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.

—Margaret Wappler, Los Angeles Times

‘TIME IS WATCHING US’

Mifune (ODC Records)

Grade: B

Mifune’s sophomore effort is a pleasurable, even exotic, journey.

The Cleveland band combines a lot of ingredients into its music, which it describes as afro-beat-electronique. And that’s as descriptive a definition as you can get, if you really need one. Note that’s electronique, not electronica — a nod to its hip Euro vibe.

But you might want to give it a listen before you go with whatever that conjures up in your mind. Because this quintet throws jazz, reggae, world and psychedelic rock into the pot, garnishes it with horns and serves it with the cool lead vocals of Christine Fader, a Youngstown native.

Mifune would be as at-home at a jam-band festival as in a smoky club, as most of these songs find a groove and do go on and on. A slight departure would be the title track, which grabs you with its slinky opening bass line, and adheres, more or less, to a standard song structure.

The album often wanders aimlessly at its own pace between high spots, but it’s still very easy to get into a zone while listening to it.

—Guy D’Astolfo, The Vindicator

‘When the World Comes Down’

All-American Rejects (Interscope)

Grade: C+

The best thing about the All-American Rejects is how unambitious the pop-emo quartet is. The Rejects’ supremely bratty yet relentlessly hooky singles each have seemed destined to score teenage rom-com dance-party sequences for time immemorial, and it hasn’t hurt that their emo-Adonis front man Tyson Ritter has cheekbones that could slice bread.

The band’s new record, “When the World Comes Down,” broadens the palette a bit, leavening typically cocky choruses like “I want to touch you / you want to touch me too” with synthesizer pricks and jaunty string arrangements befitting Ritter’s avowed love of musicals. Ponderous and overproduced moments like “Damn Girl” and “Back to Me” suggest soaring earnestness and slower tempos are a drag on the band’s sense of spunk. But the kick-start rockers like “Fallin’ Apart” and the gleeful kiss-off “Gives You Hell” benefit from the new breathing room.

Modern emo bands tend to treat breakups with a severity worthy of Wagner. Ritter’s penchant for hummable nastiness is a vast improvement, and lines like “Truth be told I miss you / truth be told I’m lying” are a better representation of actual teenagedom: snide, vindictive and rarely unentertaining.

The Rejects are best at small ideas with a long shelf life. “World” forgets that at points, but pretty people always get away with everything, don’t they?

—August Brown, Los Angeles Times

‘Call and Response: The Remix Album’

Maroon 5

Grade: B

Far too many pop acts taste success and shy away from ever altering the formula.

Fortunately, Maroon 5 is not among them.

The quintet’s mixture of funk, soul, pop and rock is finely calibrated and fantastically popular, but the group has allowed a host of buzzy DJs, indie rockers, rappers and producers to re-invent many of its signature hits on “Call and Response: The Remix Album,” a stopgap release that’s not quite a masterpiece but not quite shameless holiday retail bait, either.

The personnel enlisted to overhaul Maroon 5’s high-gloss pop will make bloggers’ heads explode: the Cool Kids, Cut Copy, Beach House, Mark Ronson and Of Montreal, to name a few. If frontman Adam Levine and company were looking for a way to boost their street cred, I’d say mission accomplished. The curiosity factor will probably drive many who would otherwise scorn anything bearing Maroon 5’s name to check out a few songs.

One of the pitfalls of remix albums, in any genre, can be a slavish dedication to the source material, but thankfully, “Call and Response” doesn’t have too many tracks that feel like barely tweaked originals. Most of these rejiggered tracks feature little more than Levine’s vocals and a hint of familiar melody: the Roots’ drummer, Questlove, recasts “Sunday Morning” as an amber-hued lament; Mary J. Blige helps Ronson spike “Wake Up Call” with a dose of vocal firepower; Pharrell spins “She Will Be Loved” into a stylish club anthem; and Deerhoof takes “Goodnight Goodnight,” a surging, arena-slaying ballad, and turns it into a blippy, angular and eerily naked plea for a second chance.

—Preston Jones, Fort Worth Star Telegram

‘Reverie’

Jann Klose (3 Frames Music)

Grade: B

Blessed with a melodious voice, Jann Klose tends toward exuberance whatever the lyric. Klose was born in Germany and raised in Africa, and he’s based in New York. His songs’ immaculately tasteful orchestration sounds like Eric Matthews crossed with Nick Drake, best of all on the waltz “Doing Time.” The arrangements on “Reverie” are by turns jazzy and classical, with frequent piano parts and a dedicated oboist and violinist in the band.

—Alexander F. Remington, the Washington Post

‘intuition’

Jamie Foxx

(J Records)

Grade: C

Jamie Foxx would be justified in continuing his efforts as a singer if for no other reason than as fodder for more videos as charming and lightly humorous as the one for “Just Like Me,” the first single from his sophomore album.

The track itself is one of five on the album co-written and produced by Terius “The-Dream” Nash and Christopher “Tricky” Stewart, the team behind, among their other recent successes, Rihanna’s “Umbrella” and Beyonce’s “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It).” It’s rooted in a nicely syncopated bass-and-drum rhythm track dusted with celestial keyboards and percolating acoustic guitar accents, Foxx and guest rapper T.I. trading lines that detail his worries about the girl who’s doing him wrong.

“Intuition” presents a sampler of contemporary R&B styles from producers including Timbaland, Just Blaze, Butter Beats and Calvo Da Gr8, giving the collection a disjointed air. Foxx’s identity as a musician isn’t any clearer than it was on his double platinum debut album, “Unpredictable.”

Foxx briefly resurrects his ability to channel Ray Charles in “I Don’t Need It,” while “Digital Girl,” another from The-Dream and Tricky, takes him into the world of dreamy dance pop and gets an assist from Kanye West. “Blame It” (featuring T-Pain) goes more deeply into techno with heavily processed and staccato vocal edits over a metal-shop clanking beat track from producer Christopher “Deep” Henderson.

You would have a hard time telling who’s at the center of most of these state-of-the-art but undistinctive concoctions. Unless, of course, Foxx turns them into videos.

—Randy Lewis, Los Angeles Times