Authenticity is an instinctive sense. Bastille, Years & Years, James Bay; some acts just reek of artifice. In rock music, the red flags tend to be a flood of advertising, a model bassist and a recently popular sound made more Coldplay. As a Mormon called Brendon fronting an arena-targeted pop-rock band from Las Vegas (sound familiar?) Panic! at the Disco’s Brendon Urie was under suspicion from day one. But arriving late to the commercial end of punk-pop in 2005 and gradually shedding bandmates over a decade until, with the departure of drummer Spencer Smith last year, he’s now the only remaining member doesn’t help his case.
Touring the band’s forthcoming fifth album Death of a Bachelor, written alongside the likes of Ricky Wilson and Weezer’s Rivers Cuomo and recorded solo, Urie supplies plenty of fuel for those tagging Panic! as the Nevada 1975 or the kiddie Killers, an emo pop act for those slightly too damaged and dangerous to Beliebe. The EDM disco twist to Vegas Lights and recent single Victorious; the slick boyband rebellion of Don’t Threaten Me With a Good Time, built around a sample from The B-52s’ Rock Lobster and chants of “champagne, cocaine, gasoline”; the numerous wail-along choruses resembling McBusted.
Short on hits himself, Urie making a bog standard cover of Bohemian Rhapsody a key highlight of his show – adorned tonight with a tribute chorus of David Bowie’s Oh! You Pretty Things – is like a cheap street caricaturist photocopying Guernica.
Yet with a backflip off the drum riser during Miss Jackson, Urie edges away from corniness. The piano-led, Ben Folds-like Nine in the Afternoon is stirring vaudevillian pop, while artful lyrics of pansexuality (Girls/Girls/Boys), prostitution (The Ballad of Mona Lisa) and infidelity (Lying Is the Most Fun…) lend weight, and the final Emperor’s New Clothes is the kind of worthy emo rap-rock they’ve rarely had the stomach for. Delivering plastic teen rebel populism with commitment, Panic! might cause pandemonium yet.
