Posted by Andrew Unterberger on 09/30/2011 at 2:32 PM Reviews

The Popdust Files: fall out boy, patrick stump, singles bar, soul punk

This is the one we’ve been waiting for since Patrick Stump went solo. Cuts like “Explode” and “This City” were interesting but unsatisfying; it didn’t feel like Stump was really playing to his strengths on either, musically or lyrically. On “Allie,” Stump finds himself in much more familiar thematic territory, singing longingly about desiring another shot with a girl whose sexual maturity was just a little too much for him back in his teenage years. Make no mistake, though—this isn’t a Fall Out Boy number by any means, much closer musically to a ballad from Stump’s hero Prince, with lyrics and vocals (woo, falsetto!) worthy of the Purple One.

The song sees a “not broken-hearted, [just] kind of pissed off” Stump reminiscing about a girl he knew when he was younger. She comes on to him in a friend’s bedroom, but despite being “drunk beyond [his] fifteen years,” Stump chickens out, sliding “unsuavely off the mattress.” Looking back on it now, Stump bemoans how good he was back then—well-behaved, not sexually proficient—and wonders if his manners would be as such now, finally coming to the insta-classic conclusion “You should have taught me such naughty things / You could have taught me such naughty things.”

Musically, the thing is Prince through-and-through, from the guitar solo to the bass pops (a la “Do Me Baby”) to the lyrical fixation on naughtiness to the always-welcome lapses into falsetto. But the song is strong enough to deserve the comparison—that chorus especially is a grabber—and Stun’mp bring more than enough of his own personality to the proceedings that it never feels like a total rip-off. Even though it’s sung with His Funkiness’ cadence, you can’t exactly see Prince ever straight-facedly singing a line like “When you said that you were protected / I thought you meant you had a gun.”

We don’t know if it’s the long-awaited solo breakthrough hit that we’ve long been anticipating and hoping for since we first heard Stump on his own—Prince’s disciples aren’t exactly ruling the charts at the moment—but it reinforces our faith they may one day be capable of delivering one. At the very least, Soul Punk should be kind of cool.

[Idolator]

POPDUST SAYS:
[starreview tpl=16]