Panic! At The Disco – Vices And Virtues
The first time I heard of Panic! At The Disco was at the Give It A Name festival, which used to occur joyously and expensively in May at Earl’s Court over the course of a weekend and which catered both to lovers of the punk/emo/screamo end of the rock spectrum and to fans of overpriced junk food. I can’t really put my finger on why, but I found them intensely annoying, and the line, “Haven’t you people ever heard of/closing a god-damn door,” stood out as particularly eye-twitchingly irritating. A few months later and that line had burrowed its way through my ear drum and grafted itself onto the side of my cerebral cortex, and I was jiving away to I Write Sins Not Tragedies in cheerfully dank and dark London rock clubs with everyone else.
That is, admittedly, a rather long-winded way of saying that yes, I do actually quite like Panic! At The Disco. Not so much the second album (‘the one with the creative differences’), but the alarmingly folky tone of Pretty. Odd. has been jettisoned, along with half the band, in favour of a return to the delightfully baroque and decadent sound that made them famous in the first place. It’s a sound that’s easy to dislike, however irrationally, but if you know that already then you won’t be listening to Vices and Virtues, the new opus, in the first place.
The image P!ATD conjure, drawing on a debauched 1920s notion, is sexy and immoral- you can see why it gets people interested. It’s best implemented in Hurricane, which has a very funky bassline to start it off and sees Urie very successfully capture lyrically what Ross implemented on AFYCSO. Hurricane kicks off a brilliant trio of grand midsection songs- Memories is a melancholy-sounding ode to trying and failing while Ready To Go has a good old crowd chant-bait and rocks along at a great pace.
The rest is relatively solid but not especially memorable- nothing wrong with it, but nothing to make me even remember the titles beyond The Ballad Of Mona Lisa, which is the single. Overall, V&V feels a lot like a band reassuring us that they’ve still got it, in spite of being cut in two- Panic! (with the exclamation mark restored) are saying, look, it’s been rough but we can do what we used to. They’ve stabilised a ship (which, admittedly, was only sinking depending on your taste). Now they need to rise to new and greater things.
trying to get the fever back
Panic! At The Disco – Vices And Virtues
The first time I heard of Panic! At The Disco was at the Give It A Name festival, which used to occur joyously and expensively in May at Earl’s Court over the course of a weekend and which catered both to lovers of the punk/emo/screamo end of the rock spectrum and to fans of overpriced junk food. I can’t really put my finger on why, but I found them intensely annoying, and the line, “Haven’t you people ever heard of/closing a god-damn door,” stood out as particularly eye-twitchingly irritating. A few months later and that line had burrowed its way through my ear drum and grafted itself onto the side of my cerebral cortex, and I was jiving away to I Write Sins Not Tragedies in cheerfully dank and dark London rock clubs with everyone else.
That is, admittedly, a rather long-winded way of saying that yes, I do actually quite like Panic! At The Disco. Not so much the second album (‘the one with the creative differences’), but the alarmingly folky tone of Pretty. Odd. has been jettisoned, along with half the band, in favour of a return to the delightfully baroque and decadent sound that made them famous in the first place. It’s a sound that’s easy to dislike, however irrationally, but if you know that already then you won’t be listening to Vices and Virtues, the new opus, in the first place.
The image P!ATD conjure, drawing on a debauched 1920s notion, is sexy and immoral- you can see why it gets people interested. It’s best implemented in Hurricane, which has a very funky bassline to start it off and sees Urie very successfully capture lyrically what Ross implemented on AFYCSO. Hurricane kicks off a brilliant trio of grand midsection songs- Memories is a melancholy-sounding ode to trying and failing while Ready To Go has a good old crowd chant-bait and rocks along at a great pace.
The rest is relatively solid but not especially memorable- nothing wrong with it, but nothing to make me even remember the titles beyond The Ballad Of Mona Lisa, which is the single. Overall, V&V feels a lot like a band reassuring us that they’ve still got it, in spite of being cut in two- Panic! (with the exclamation mark restored) are saying, look, it’s been rough but we can do what we used to. They’ve stabilised a ship (which, admittedly, was only sinking depending on your taste). Now they need to rise to new and greater things.