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It’s difficult to think of any band whose first two albums stand at such variance as Panic! At the Disco’s ‘A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out’ and the follow up ‘Pretty Odd.’ When Panic! burst out of the Fallout Boy lead emo-plosion of the early noughties the order of the day was a cocktail of crunching guitars, cabaret camp and song titles wordier than a Guardian review of the dictionary. ‘A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out’ was many things. Repeatable it was not. The band scrapped a whole albums worth of material written in a similar vein before tapping into before tapping into the spirit of Lennon and McCartney on ‘Pretty Odd’, an album more grounded in the 1960’s than modern attitudes to drugs, feminism or the notion that England are good at football.
So now Panic! are back, as is their exclamation mark. Is this an omen that they intend to go back to writing sins, not Sgt.Pepper’s send ups? The way the orchestration on opening track and lead single ‘Mona Lisa’ gives way to distorted bass and lines, delivered with a rich, quick snapped delivery certainly suggests so. “Say what you mean/ Show me I’m right” sings Brendon, his voice rising through the notes held on the last word, suggesting he was almost definitely doing Glee style “jazz hands” at the time.
The big production values from ‘Pretty Odd’ are here, smoothing out the jolting sensibility of ‘A Fever…’ to produce something perfectly pitched, not only at all quarters of the groups diverse set of fans, but also at commercial radio. As opening tracks go its pretty belting and, unfortunately, the next few songs, whilst all satisfying, don’t quite match up.
However, at track six, ‘I’m Ready To Go’, the album gets it’s second wind. This is a song so preposterously poppy it makes Rebecca Black look as world weary and wizened as Bob Dylan. Just to clarify, this is a good thing. At this point it’s almost as if the band remember that they got bored of rocking out after their first album. The whole second half of the album is an orchestral pop adventure but the last two songs over shadow everything that goes before.
On ‘Sarah Smiles’ the band revert to back to the sound of their last album, as if having suffered amnesia they’ve had to retrace their musical steps to rediscover where they were at. The pay off of this process comes in the last song ‘Nearly Witches’ a joyous letting loose in the realm of Fallout Boy’s Mr Benzedrine (which, naturally enough, featured Panic!) which takes a side ways leap into the biggest chorus you’ll hear this year. We’re talking, strings, brass, children’s choirs, the world holding hands and learning to sing as one type stuff. It’s stupid. It’s glorious. The tag line is “Ever since we met/ I only shoot up with your perfume.” Case rested.
So, has the band matured? Nope. And thank god for that, who needs a mature Panic! At The Disco? This is a band who don’t vary between the sublime and the ridiculous but rather see one as a means to the other. Is this record a step forward? Again, no. They’ve essentially gone around in a big circle, but as Leonardo Di Vinci would tell you, circles are pretty artful things.
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