Panic at the Disco look back for their future.

Who says punctuation isn’t important?

When last we saw Panic! At the Disco, they were all about hyper-literate emo, circus imagery, guyliner, closing doors and that ever-crucial exclamation point.

For its sophomore album “Pretty. Odd.,” the Las Vegas quartet has dropped the exclamation point from its name and seemingly turned into a completely different band, one with well-crafted songs steeped in Beatles grandeur, Beach Boys harmonies and other pleasantly surprising ambitions.

The Beatlesque first single “Nine in the Afternoon,” complete with horn flourishes and a streamlined hook that is hard to shake, was no fluke. It was the throwing down of the gauntlet.

Aside from Brendon Urie’s distinctive vocals (and even those are bolstered by new harmonies and less-frantic phrasing), nearly nothing else from the band’s multiplatinum debut “A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out” remains.

There’s a New Orleans jazz feel to “I Have Friends in Holy Places.” There’s “Folkin’ Around,” which oddly sounds like a countrified “I’ve Just Seen a Face.” And there are loads of gorgeous pop songs, including “Northern Downpour,” an acoustic gem that sounds like Panic’s take on a “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” ballad.

Like their mentors Fall Out Boy did on “Infinity on High,” Panic at the Disco has taken a quantum leap forward in terms of ambition and execution. “Pretty. Odd.” is the exact opposite of the sophomore slump - a sophomore smash they can be proud of.

PRETTY. ODD. Panic at the Disco look back for their future. In stores today.

That Green Gentleman


Things are shaping up to be pretty odd.
Little deaths in musical beds.
So it seems I'm someone I've never met.

You will only hear these elegant crimes,
Fall on your ears from criminal dimes.
They spill unfound from a pretty mouth.

everybody gets there and everybody gets their way.
I never said I missed her when everybody kissed her,
Now I'm the only one to blame.


Things have changed for me, and that's okay.
I feel the same, I'm on my way, and I say.
Things have changed for me, and that's okay.


I want to go where everyone goes,
I want to know what everyone knows
I want to go where everyone feels the same

I never said I'd leave the city,
I never said I'd leave this town.
A falling out we won't tiptoe about.

She's handsome woman

Innocence.
Sunk the glow and drowned in covers,
send for all your absent lovers things.

Sheepish Wolves.
Looking lived in eating buttons,
Wink, just don't put your teeth on me.

Accidents.
Let the evening in the backdoor,
filled the room ceiling to the floor.

Beat backbones.
Grazed the poem and made it strange,
I wasn't born to be a skeleton.

Go on,
grab your hat and fetch a camera.
Go on, film the world before it happens.

Jealous orchard.
The sky is falling off the ceiling
while I'm tucking fibs into a cookie jar.

Bombed reverie.
It's useless searching in the cupboards
when everything you have is on your back.

Cobra Starship's guitarist Ryland Blackinton mentioned Panic At The Disco on his
LiveJournal today.

I just got home from our show in Panama City, Florida. It was spring break
for a lot of people so there was a consistent level of excitement around us
at all times. Fortunately for me, it was not very hot out. We played with Tyga
and our friends Panic at the Disco. I hadn't seen them since our tour in the UK and was happy to catch up and commend them on their new record.

A funny thing occurred several times by the beach. Our dressing rooms
were about 200 yards away from the backstage entrance so we would walk to
and fro all day long. On the way, you'd have to pass large groups of college
party people getting their Spring Break on. Most of them had cans of piss cheap
beer and visors on their heads. Before we played, a girl saw me walking by and
shouted, "Nice tights faggot!" The deepness of her profoundly intelligent outburst
weighed heavy on my mind. The true 'kicker' was that the girl had paid money for a ticket to see our band but was unaware that I was a member of it. Alex and Spencer's clothes yielded
similar responses. All seasoned with clever words like, "faggot" and "homo."
Most of these same dudes asked to have pictures with us in the parking lot after
the show. Things that make you go hmmm.

The red-haired girl at the bar is having a crisis: she has been declared too young to buy alcohol and furiously hurls an apparently bogus ID card on the bar. Another youth adopts a more philosophical approach: “I’ve come to the conclusion I won’t get served.” Spiky, furious - and that is just their hairstyles - these are typical of Panic At the Disco’s young emo crowd. However, their favourite band seem to be making plans for when everybody grows up. Having dispensed with their name’s exclamation mark and shows featuring contortionists, the Las Vegas quartet are maturing with normal clothes and music influenced by 1960s pop. They even cover country-rock anthem The Weight by the Band with an assurance that is perhaps not entirely appreciated by a crowd who cheerily pelt them with glow-sticks.


Still, this gig is a fascinating example of a band’s ability to challenge their own audience and take them somewhere else. Punk remains in Panic’s stick thin frames and singer Brendan Urie’s resemblance to a youthful Henry Rollins (if it is possible to imagine the notorious iron-pumper squeezed into anything as effete as winkle pickers). However, their piano-plonking anthems are simultaneously bubblegum and mature: a blend of Billy Joel and the Monkees.

Although the audience are happiest slam-dancing to songs about “kids in the street”, the band’s more polished material is still sung back at them by a crowd who are not outfoxed by complicated lyrics about rites of passage and near-death experiences. Youthful, tuneful, but with subtlety and emerging depth, Panic are a band for that moment when teenage enthusiasm dips into adulthood’s tendency to cry into your beer. Admittedly, if you do not have any beer to cry into, this can present a problem.



__________________________________________________________________



Back in 2005, Panic were on the cusp. Barely a year earlier they’d been signed by Fall Out Boy’s Pete Wentz on the strength of a handful of songs he had heard on the internet.

Their debut, A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out, went on to sell more than 2 million copies, ­setting the Las Vegas foursome on the path to becoming the poster boys for baroque emo.

Theirs is the sort of music that polarised. There were those who held up their genre-splicing rock theatricality as the latest frontier.

But equally the boys ­inspired a hail of plastic ­bottles at Reading Festival in 2006, one of which knocked-out singer Brendon Urie.

After 18 months of touring and some down time to “get domesticated again, buy houses, get dogs”, PATD decamped to a Nevada cabin to write. “Last January we had about six songs and it was sort of a story I was writing,” ­recalls Ross. “But it was becoming more of a chore than a pleasure, so we stopped.”


The boys scrapped the sessions and started afresh. Their previous album was a flurry of Chuck Palahniuk-referencing lyrics revolving around heartbreak and betrayal with enough syllables to make Dizzee’s jaw drop.

The follow-up is a sonically extravagant Sgt. Peppers-style trip, complete with harmonies, big brass and not a synthesizer in earshot. And the tone? It’s resolutely jaunty. “During the first album we were just angsty teenagers,” nods Urie. “There were a lot of hormones – we were pouting throughout the whole thing!”

Jon adds: “We just grew up and realised there’s more important stuff than the girl that cheated on you four years ago.”

They look a totally different group too. Skinny jeans, feather cuts and artfully applied man make-up have been replaced with an American Gothic-meets-Mormon vibe.

When levelled with this suggestion and handed a copy of the iconic 1930s painting, Ross exclaims, “Do I look like this?” pointing an accusatory finger before crumpling it up in mock disgust. “They look Amish.”

“Exactly,” says Urie. “This record is a bit more Amish.”

Not that this new look or sound will do anything to dampen the ardour of their fans, in particular the ladies. There’s an infamous video on YouTube completely dedicated to Urie’s posterior. It is so popular, its creator has just posted a sequel . “Really? There’s a slideshow of my ass?” asks an ­incredulous Urie.

“He put that together for Jon,” quips Ross.

“That wasn’t supposed to get out! ” replies Urie.

“For the record, me and Brendon are not dating,” pipes up Jon.

“Are you still trying to quash the gay rumours?” Ross retorts.

“We weren’t until we started talking about Brendon sending me nudie pictures!” cries Urie.