Review: Panic! At the Disco – A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out

Panic! At the Disco - A Fever You Can't Sweat Out

When Panic! At the Disco called it quits earlier this year, it bared little resemblance to the band Fall Out Boy’s Pete Wentz signed to his Deycandance Label back in 2005 after getting demos from former lead guitarist Ryan Ross via Live Journal. In fact, there was no band. After years of lineup changes, Brendon Urie used the Panic! At the Disco name for his solo project starting in 2015. But this dramatic shift didn’t hinder their success. If anything, they seemed to be bigger than ever thanks to chart-topping albums like Death of a Bachelor and Too Weird to Live, Too Rare to Die! But before the lineup changes and Urie’s solo career, Panic! At the Disco were five friends from Vegas who shook up the alt-rock scene with their stellar debut album, A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out.

Urie said he wanted the band to do “whatever we wanted” and that’s exactly what they did on their 2005 debut, but making it was a daunting task. After getting signed to Deycadance, the band entered the studio in June 2005 with only three and a half weeks to record on a budget of $11,000. Recording sessions were strenuous often lasting 14 hours a day five days a week. Adding to the tension were the band’s cramped living conditions; they shared a one-bedroom basement apartment that was so small they had to sleep in bunk beds. And because things weren’t stressful enough, Urie blew out his vocals after tracking the album.

During recording, the band went through “an identity crisis” trying to figure out the album’s sound. The electronic-based demos they wrote in Vegas didn’t match the rock-forward songs they wrote in the studio. Rather than ditching the rock songs, producer Matt Squire convinced them to include all tracks they recorded and use “the creative evolution as the theme of the album.” This was an ambitious move that would eventually pay off when the record was finally released three months later.

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Review: Panic! At The Disco – Viva Las Vengeance

The latest offering of music from Panic! At the Disco leaves a lot to be desired. It has some of the magic that made Panic a household name, but most of the ideas that are brought forth on Viva Las Vengeance ultimately feel forced and not fully fleshed out. The album was produced by Jake Sinclair, Mike Viola and Brendon Urie, and when the material is on point, it can be a fun ride, yet too many of these songs don’t live up the high (high) hopes. The promotional cycle included releasing four singles, that tried to garner enough interest in the record that was coming off of one of Panic! At The Disco’s more successful albums in Pray for the Wicked, and yet early reactions to the title track, “Middle of a Breakup,” and “Local God” left a lot of fans nervous about the direction Brendon Urie would be taking on the band’s seventh studio album. What we’re ultimately left with is a missed opportunity for Urie and his production team to take Panic! At The Disco to the next level.

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Decaydance Records: An Oral History

Fall Out Boy

The Forty Five has a great new oral history all about Decaydance Records. The part about Snakes on a Plane, specifically, brought back quite a few memories:

Midtown had broken up so Gabe was trying to figure out what he was going to do next. He had a song called ‘Bring it’ he was working on that had a cool vibe. Sisky from Academy called and said, ‘There’s a movie called Snakes on a Plane that might be the worst movie of all time. We should try to get our song ‘Black Mamba’ in it’. A friend of mine was the music supervisor on the movie, so I called him and asked if we could get the song in. He said there weren’t going to be songs in the movie, only score, but I convinced him to let us do a soundtrack. We went to Gabe and told him he needed to add some parts to ‘Bring it’ to be about snakes on a plane. He wasn’t super happy with me at the time but he was a team player.

Panic! at the Disco’s Flourishes Weren’t Just Dramatic. They Were Theater.

Panic! at the Disco

Maya Phillips, writing at The New York Times, looks back on Panic! at the Disco’s debut:

Fifteen years ago, a mysterious top-hatted figure and a parade of circus performers interrupted a wedding in a music video with an unconventional soundtrack: an energetic pop-punk song with a bouncy, carnivalesque cello opening.

This is how Panic! at the Disco announced itself in the “I Write Sins Not Tragedies” video, the first from its 2005 debut album, “A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out.” Though the band has undergone many reinventions in the years since, it’s closely associated with its original aesthetic: a distinctive theatrical sensibility that drew on the sound of early 2000s pop-punk while also referencing vintage performance styles — burlesque, vaudeville, old Broadway musicals — to illustrate themes of duplicity, addiction and broken relationships.