Panic at the Disco – Pretty. Odd.
Panic at the Disco – Pretty. Odd.
Fueled By Ramen 2008
Rating: 8.5/10
I absolutely hated Panic! at the Disco’s faux-prog rock emo caricature that was their debut hit album, A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out. Their ridiculous stage setups, Fall Out Boy-mimicking vocals, and tongue-in-cheek lyrical posturing repulsed me, but it made them platinum stars and MTV darlings.
With the removal of the ! from their name, however, seems to have come a sort of maturity for the emo playwrights, and Pretty.Odd. is an interesting, ambitious, and surprisingly inspired follow-up. I couldn’t believe I was actually enjoying it when I first listened to it, but it’s true: Panic at the Disco has grown up, musically and lyrically.
Lead single “Nine in the Afternoon” leads off with a bouncy piano line and a catchy guitar line, and lead singer Brendon Urie manages to avoid the high-note yelping that made the band so annoying throughout not only the song but also most of the album. His lyrics are just as metaphor-heavy and dense poetics but less obviously so, and this is a huge relief from those who hated Fever. Only when Urie gets pathetically sappy (“She Had The World”) do the words grate.
The music is ridiculously diverse, from “Do You Know What I’m Seeing” violin balladry to the pastoral flute on “The Piano Knows Something I Don’t Know.” They even bring out the country-folk in the rural church singing of “I Have Friends in Holy Spaces” and the giddy fiddle on the tongue-in-cheek “Folkin’ Around.”
The record’s highlight, the irresistibly catchy, nostalgia-tinged “Northern Downpour,” is buoyed by the harmonizing between Urie and guitarist Ryan Ross, whose voice has evidently been possessed by some psychedelic imp in love with the Beatles. The swirling electric guitar licks that erupt halfway through mesh perfectly with the acoustic strum and gentle drums as the song coalesces into a chorus that is pure polyphonic bliss.
The band’s obvious Queen fixation and ‘60s pop homages work out for the better, luckily distancing them from their labelmates and hopefully pointing toward a more long-lived career beyond emo.
Themocracy