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.