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Panic At the Disco Pretty Odd Kids grow up so fast these days. One day, they’re toddling in their Huggies; next thing you know, they’ve got beards and they’re getting over their guyliner phase. Panic at the Disco—who recently dropped the exclamation point from their name, disowning it like a nose ring they’d outgrown—wrote much of their 2005 debut, A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out, in high school. Their adolescence showed not only in their baby faces but in their Max-Fischer-Player–size ambitions: No song was complete without four movements, 4,000 syllables and references to punk rock as well as cabaret; no outfit was right without an Oscar Wilde–worthy heaping of frills and waistcoats; and no performance was over until dominatrix mimes and fire-breathing stilt-walkers had crowded the stage. Now that Panic are in their 20s, this second album arrives with some sober advance notice: They recently discovered the Beatles, they say, and in the bargain, maturity. Gone are the endless song titles; gone are lyrics stinky with 10-shilling words even the V for Vendetta dude would be embarrassed to say; gone, thank god, are the emo-rooster hairdos.
Lesser Beatlemaniacs ape the naiveté and the jangling guitars and stop there. Panic at the Disco—helmed by singer Brendon Urie and guitarist-wordsmith Ryan Ross—act like they’re romping through a wax museum. Or through Las Vegas, the band’s hometown: Listening to Pretty. Odd. feels like a giddy stroll down the Strip, past the Eiffel Tower, the Statue of Liberty and all the other facsimile landmarks. Look, there’s the Mellotron from “Strawberry Fields Forever”! There’s the cacophonous climax from “A Day in the Life”! There’s the galloping beat from “Get Back”! The sights keep coming—fake, plastic, diminished, exciting—as the band hopscotches from Revolver to Let It Be. Some kids discover the Beatles through their parents’ vinyl; some get wise during freshman year. Panic at the Disco’s indoctrination seems to have started with the Oasis discography and culminated in row AA at Cirque du Soleil’s LOVE revue.
Well, what’s wrong with that? Panic’s cherry-picking yields several good songs, and a few that brush up against greatness. The best are the most freewheeling: The jaunty “Nine in the Afternoon” celebrates a druggy, time-bending state of happiness, with unexpected little rhythmic shifts adding to the off-kilter vibe. On “That Green Gentlemen,” bells chime and spry riffs intertwine as Urie sings about giving in to exhilarating, terrifying change. And he does so succinctly: On Panic’s word-driven debut, Urie worked hard to give meter and melody to Ross’s labored verse. Here, attempting a Sgt. Pepper–style surrealism, Ross has pruned his scribblings (perhaps thanks to a nudge from Blender, which last year named him one of rock’s 40 worst lyricists). At best, his words are evocative ciphers. Sometimes, they’re sub-“Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” BS (“When the sun found the moon, she was drinking tea/In a garden under the green umbrella trees”). Mostly, they’re pleasant nonsense. Set against the ’60s references, though, Urie—a chronic over-enunciator whose nasally singing oozes emo—can stick out. Often it’s as though the band has donned spotless Fab Four suits but forgotten to zip their flies.
Why does decades-old music prove so alluring to these poster boys of rock’s MySpace generation? They got signed after uploading demos to a message board, for blog’s sake. (The Beatles did not.) From their Charles Dickens verbiage to their Victorian-gent getups, though, Panic have always romanticized the past. The myth of rock’s golden age—in particular, the aura of ’60s universality and timelessness—probably appeals to these nostalgic residents of the digitalized, fragmented present. What saves them from retro tedium is their sense of play. When pop acts talk about “maturing,” it usually means “realizing that your middle-school fans are no longer in middle school.” Rock’s reigning maturity kings are Green Day, whose ascension from jerk-off pranksters to arena-punk pundits set the template for similar makeovers from blink-182, My Chemical Romance and the Killers. To Panic’s credit, their “mature” album turns this trend on its head: The band began at a stratospheric level of pretension. Here, they’ve relaxed, shed their grandiosity and learned how to goof around. http://panic-rock.com
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