Review: Panic! At The Disco – Death Of A Bachelor
28th January 2016Now with their fifth studio album debuting at Billboard’s number one, and entering the top five in the UK, Panic! At The Disco’s – Death Of A Bachelor is a rollercoaster of an album.
Packed full of anthemic choruses, infectious beats and a relatively new sound, showcases Brandon Urie’s ability to tell a story in less than four minutes.
Death Of A Bachelor comes a close third in length to 2008’s Pretty Odd and their debut album in 2005, A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out, with 11 tracks, of which each is a strong song in their own right.
Opening with a cheerleading squad for the introductory Electro sounding track Victorious, the album takes a more party anthem style with thumping baseline on Don’t Threaten Me With A Good Time, where Urie paints a scene (in traditional Panic flair) of a Hangover style party loosing bets to guy in a Chiffon skirt, wearing high heels (and making them work) and him making you think he’s “not a think as you drunk I am”.
Three tracks in, and Hallelujah breaks, sounding like the old Panic we know and love. It’s anthem like chorus is gonna kill it at concerts across the globe this Summer.
Enter track four the game changer of a track with ‘that’ video carrying on from This Is Gospel from 2013’s To Weird To Live, Too Rare To Die! with Charleston like beat, and it’s sinister Fun House sound.
By track five, the album turns on its head, with December’s single release and the album eponymous title, Death Of A Bachelor, this is the track showcasing Urie’s vocal range and Crooner like talents to make Sinatra jealous.
The middle tracks Crazy = Genius, LA Devotee and Golden Days are stereotypically Panic! with storytelling, Big Band sounds and the more newer side to Panic’s sound arsenal.
The concluding trio of tales tell the stories of a love turned sour in The Good, The Bad and The Dirty, a place filled with memories of love and loss with a more darker sinister tone to it in the House Of Memories, but it’s the final track that leaves you feeling a sense of sadness, in the Impossible Year.
The song refers to a person leaving with the concluding lines reading, “There’s no sunshine. There’s no you and me. There’s no good times. This Impossible Year”. The band has been through hard times with two founding members leaving in 2008, and the final founding member Spencer Smith leaving in February 2015, so could this be Urie’s account of making Death Of A Bachelor alone?
This album is the Panic! we know and love, just in a new guise with the traditional Steampunk sound at its core. It’s lyrically repetitive, but the catchy baselines and choruses make up for it. It’s a new chapter for Panic! now Brandon is at the forefront and it’s a very exciting one at that.