What's a band to do when it finds itself not so much bumped out of the spotlight as had the spotlight bumped away from it? Such is the question to ask when considering Panic! At the Disco’s latest release Vices & Virtues. It has only been three years since the the band broke through with Pretty. Odd and unfortunately (for them) they (along with many other bands under the Fueled by Ramen label) have already begun to slip from popular fashion. At one point, their crackling pop rock sound cornered the market on rock music you could actually dance to, but their audience (the American Top 40 crowd) has drifted in favor of extremes; more actual blues, more actual folk or more actual hip-hop – whichever, more interest is being paid to time-honored forms and it's falling away from hybrids.
Which brings us back to the question: what do you do when the spotlight has been nudged off you? Where other groups would adopt whatever audible stance was currently popular, Panic! has steadfastly held its ground. Vices & Virtues plays like a solid continuation of Pretty. Odd, with similar drive, a consistent message, and that signature Panic! style they refused to let go of, even to the point of splintering the band (see the Young Veins, a retro-rock outfit started by post Panic! members Ryan Ross and John Walker).
Vices & Virtues pulls no punches with the opening track, “The Ballad of Mona Lisa,” kicking off with drifting piano notes before drubbing up a meaty bass line that we’ll hear throughout the album, and that beat is a count of Whatever You Can Swing Your Hips To. A catchy and gritty chorus drags listeners in by the ears and doesn’t let go, blending lead singer Brendon Urie’s high glossy vocals into the crunchier bits of guitar with aplomb.
And hey, it worked well for the first track, so why not try it again?
The subsequent five tracks do nothing but gain momentum. “Let’s Kill Tonight” has touches of Eighties synthesizers that roll up with anything that can make a loud noise for some heavy head-bopping beats with a touch of rock/metal guitar work laced throughout. “Hurricane” opens with snappy percussion and a raw, pounding bass drum before being smoothed over with some shimmying synth sounds that drop into a bold cacophony of beats and rushing guitar riffs.
While a few tracks can be traced stylistically back to Pretty. Odd (“Always” is decidedly more stripped down and introspective, and “Sarah Smiles” plays with some elder instruments like mandolins, squeezeboxes and Spanish beats we heard more of in the aforementioned album) Vices & Virtues feels like a stylistic return to their debut A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out: loud, danceable, blended baroque pop music without coming off as stagnant. Panic! at the Disco has held its stylistic ground with this new album; now all that will remain to be seen is whether or not their previous audience will hold the line with them.
Artist:
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Album:
Vices & Virtues is out now. Buy it here on Amazon .
Seventeen years ago, a global trust of disaffected youth found sanctuary in the aggressive rock of the Seventies (all genres included—hard rock, punk, metal and more) and the sounds of the early Eighties underground along with hardcore. Those with instruments began to intermingle those sounds and came up with something all their own that someone (it has been credited to Mark Lanegan of Screaming Trees) called ‘grunge.‘ Fifteen years or so after that explosion, the current batch of very ineffectual musicians have trekked back to the same two decades, unearthed glitter rock, a pantheon of pop, new wave and disco and are intermingling those sounds to create their own unique hybrid. It’s clean, polished and hook-heavy but sanitized for your protection, pressed and neatly produced. What shall we call it? ‘Detergent.’
The first insurgents of this new era of detergent-rock are Panic At The Disco and, on the band’s sophomore long-player, it has set all the precedents and laid the framework for a whole new crowd of fashionable youths to follow. Shiny and plastic with an astonishing amount of elitist sarcasm, Pretty. Odd. makes it okay to point and laugh at the weirdos again as the band contrasts proletariat imagery (“We’re So Starving”) with the holier-than-thou (“I Have Friends In Holy Spaces”) and set it against walls of strings, keys and a load of multi-layered vocals to dismiss and/or ignore anything that didn’t come out of the same mould.
The frustrating thing is that it works! It’s difficult to not want to blend in and conform as Panic At The Disco manufacture a lush and really pretty sound that’s only sardonic and down-putting if you scratch below the surface. Songs like the gentle acoustic “Northern Downpour”, the wailing but pitch-perfect “She’s A Handsome Woman” and lackadaisical but infectiously melodic “Do You See What I’m Seeing?” don’t have a damned thing to say (the lyric sheet of “Do You See…” actually talks about the weather—seriously), but these songs are the nicest, most melodic and prettiest imaginable way to be vacuous and vacant that ultimately goes exactly nowhere.
As a rock snob, what Panic At The Disco is proposing with Pretty. Odd. is pretty terrifying on one hand and pretty hard not to like on the other The way these songs are written, it’s really easy to swallow lines like, “Thing have changed for me, and that’s okay/ I feel the same, I’m on the way” because, the way it’s performed, it’s obvious that the band is on its way up and detergent-rock is on its way in. Oh wait—there’s no such thing as detergent-rock? Good thing – I was beginning to get really worried.
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