PART ONE: THE BULLSHIT

We’re now more than halfway through 2019, and never have I felt more like the ever-nebulous “scene” is standing on some sort of precipice where old and new, “fake” and “real,” are no longer things of any concern. We’ve delved into this sort of postmodernism before, but those past experiments (BrokeNCYDE and Hollywood Undead, anyone?) just seem clumsy in retrospect. The new Sanction record is literally just an update on the 7 Angels 7 Plagues/Misery Signals brand of emotionally and melodically pained metalcore. Shin Guard continue to amaze with material that ranges from chopped-up Fall of Troy riffage to Slint-y spoken word, all wrapped up within a traditionally screamo context. And if you’ve never heard the truly transcendent bubblegum bass/MySpace mish-mash/ska/dubstep/ringtone pop of 100 Gecs’s magnum opus, 1000 Gecs, I honestly envy that you will have that experience for the first time.

There have been many words written about #twentyninescene, a somewhat roughly-sketched concept that states 2019 is the year of the new crop of kids embracing their roots in the world of flat-ironed hair, T-mobile Sidekicks, and Stickam. Over at Metal Injection, Drew Kaufman has penned several articles giving artists like From Autumn to Ashes and Norma Jean their due. The spiritual forbear of this site, Finn McKenty, has talked about upstarts SeeYouSpaceCowboy and Wristmeetrazor embracing the scene aesthetic while simultaneously playing to crowds of people who, had they been around back then, would have spit in these bands’ faces and gone right back to fawning over Palatka and In Loving Memory or whatever. I myself name-checked the phenomenon in my coverage of Pattern Recognition, a fascinating and fucking bizarre record label (which, coincidentally, recently released one of my top five albums of the year so far, Die On Mars by the Callous Daoboys— a daring blend of Every Time I Die, Glassjaw, My Chemical Romance, and a fucking violinist).

All of this to say that, despite all of the Critical Reappraisal happening around bands who were considered teenybopper bullshit at the time (I wait with bated breath for the AV Club to release an oral history of Underøath’s They’re Only Chasing Safety for its 15th anniversary), there’s been a remarkable lack of attention given to the bands who transcended their underground roots and became VMA-level famous, despite those bands producing art just as worthy of critical engagement as the breakdowns and technical fireworks of their less pop-oriented brethren.

PART TWO: WHY YOU WEREN’T SUPPOSED TO LIKE THEM

I’m as surprised as anyone else that I find myself wishing to give this crop of bands their due. Back in my halcyon days, I hid my affinity for the Warped Tour set like a dirty secret, beneath my obsession with the hardcore du jour such as Ceremony, Trash Talk, and Blacklisted, as well as a burgeoning involvement in the scenes that would soon become known as “emo revival” and “skramz.” And although I’ve outgrown my embarrassment and shame about many of these bands, one still lingers with an overbearing stench of “fake poser bullshit”: Panic! at the Disco.

I was considering a litany of bands to be the first entry of this series: Fall Out Boy; the Academy Is…; Senses Fail (I maintain that Still Searching is just as good as that other 2006 post-hardcore concept record about death); the Used; and of course, Paramore and My Chemical Romance, both of whom actually are kind of undergoing that Critical Reappraisal I was talking about earlier– or at least Paramore’s more recent work and The Black Parade are. The latter is MCR’s entry into the “rock canon,” having long ago been deemed “safe” for the patrician set to like, and the former have morphed into Blondie-esque genre-bending artistes on par with Chvrches or Charli XCX. All of these bands will probably be given their time in the sun, but I wanted to start this series off with a band that even people who will cop to being fans of the aforementioned acts might pull back from.

And why shouldn’t they? By all rights, Panic! should be deemed inauthentic and without credibility. They were 17 year olds who had never played a note of music at a live show prior to being signed to a record label, and didn’t even know how to use a guitar tuner while recording their (Matt Squire-produced and given a budget of fucking $11,000– that’s in 2005 money!) debut album. They got radio and MTV play as well as a vaunted cover story from Rolling Stone pretty much immediately. Their frontman was unbearably pretty. Worst of all, they were well-off private school kids (Bishop Gorman, to be exact) from the wealthy Las Vegas community of Summerlin who dressed up in ostentatious outfits and engaged in the sort of over the top LiveJournal drama that would make even someone with the handle xXxTasteOfInk96xXx cringe.

They started off as Pete Wentz’s vanity project, kickstarting his Fueled By Ramen imprint, Decaydance, which would later play host to an array of acts including scene-adjacent fixtures Cute Is What We Aim For, the Academy Is…, and Cobra Starship, the booze-and-coke-fueled/Ke$ha-gone-Kiki-Kannibal party girls Millionaires, emo-trap upstart nothing,nowhere., and even NJHC legends Lifetime. That Panic! piqued the Fall Out Boy bassist/lyricist/mogul’s ears is not shocking– Ryan Ross’s extremely literate, wry-beyond-his-years lyrics are permeated with Wentz’s sensibilities, especially after Wentz gave them a few tweaks during the recording of Panic!’s debut, and Brendon Urie’s mellifluous warbling bears more than a passing similarity to the marble-mouthed trilling of Patrick Stump. Given that Fall Out Boy’s From Under the Cork Tree was absolutely destroying the charts by the time Panic!’s debut came out, it seemed like a given that their sound, which so clearly rested within the same confines, would be quick to gain momentum as well.

So, they had shit more made Joel and Benji Madden’s clothing line. Why should we give a shit what these rich, preppy-ass, bandwagon-hopping, privileged little snots had to say about anything?

Well, it turns out that A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out is fucking good. Like, really fucking good. Like, so good I can forgive all of the above, so good I can even forgive the fact that Panic! has metamorphosed (in much the same way as Fall Out Boy has, funnily enough) into an ugly mess of glitz-soaked and cynical pop, barely glued together by a mixture of mid-00s nostalgia and, loathe as I am to admit it, unbelievably virtuosic vocals. In fact, it’s so good, I can actually almost forget that I frequently listen to an album that shares fans with Twenty-One Pilots.

“Alright Ellie,” my imaginary readers are saying to themselves, “you’ve been jerking off about completely unrelated bullshit for 1,050 words at this point. Are you gonna talk about the music, or should I go back to calling Gerard Way fat on Facebook?”

PART THREE: WHY YOU LIKE THEM ANYWAY

First of all, I want to be clear: I literally do not listen to anything this band has ever done except for A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out, at least not on purpose. I’ve heard good things about Pretty. Odd. (and admittedly, I do enjoy “Nine in the Afternoon”), but everything else I’ve had the displeasure of hearing from Panic! is genuinely atrocious. Of course, that’s just my personal opinion, I might be entirely wrong and will have to publicly recant this later, but I just want to make it clear that I will primarily be talking about Fever. Got it? Good.

Let’s talk about Las Vegas, Nevada. Not only because it informs much of the thematic and musical content of A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out, but also because my experience with Las Vegas kind of parallels my experience with this album. I used to be really averse to telling people that I was from Las Vegas. It’s not traditionally “cool.” It’s gaudy, bright, and gross, and it attracts the worst kinds of people. But the older I get, the more I realize I can’t give a fuck about that shit, and I have to be honest: Vegas is ultimately where I come from. I don’t think I’ll ever move back there, I find the culture of the city to be gauche, and I think it’s secretly a cesspool of oppression and violence, but I claim the city now, and that’s not something I can say of my younger self.

Something that’s never explicitly spelled out by the lyrics on Fever but is undeniably embedded within it is that growing up in Vegas desensitizes you to so much shit. Alcoholism? Well, everyone’s got an alcoholic within spitting distance of them. Drinking is never the stated goal of going out, but that’s because it’s implied alcohol will be abundant. Sexism? Well, when your formative years are spent getting bombarded with strip clubs and naked women on billboards on your way to school (I’m not joking– the Hustler strip club was literally on the side of the road, in unavoidable view, on the way to school from my several of my friends’ houses), as well as a pervasive culture of glorifying sex work while demonizing sex workers themselves, and you’ve got a pretty poisonous attitude brewing about women, sex, and what those things mean to young men. Drug addiction, misery, homelessness, constant violence, the entire economy relying on gambling and tourism, a truly corrupt police force (I have a few cops in my family, and one of them literally once told me “police brutality doesn’t exist”), the complete lack of a middle class (and the resultant class envy), and a general refusal to analyze or even acknowledge the wretched material conditions that pervade every Las Vegas community, from the poverty-stricken D Street to the ketamine-and-glitter-smeared Summerlin, all result in a hellscape where even the richest and most sheltered of kids are often pretty fucked up.

At least, that’s the only explanation I can come up with for lyrics written by someone who skipped his high school graduation to go on tour that mock the naivety of “praying for love in a lap-dance” (“But It’s Better If You Do”), preemptively give the finger to webzine critics before their debut had even been released (“London Beckoned Songs About Money Made by Machines”), condemn the hypocrisy of organized religion (“I Constantly Thank God for Esteban”), detail the grotesque plot of Chuck Palahniuk’s Invisible Monsters (“Time to Dance”), paint a bleak and gruesome portrait of prostitutes toiling in abuse and squalor (“Build God, Then We’ll Talk”), and painstakingly map out the brutality of living with an alcoholic father who’s always in and out of the hospital (“Nails for Breakfast, Tacks for Snacks” and “Camisado”). In fact, the father in question ended up passing away while Panic! were on their 2006 summer tour, right before Ryan Ross turned 20.

So take that emotional volatility and intense intelligence, mix it with Brendon Urie’s desperation to break free from the religious constraints of his family’s Mormonism, and for good measure, sprinkle a dash of all the elaborate theatre-kid pretensions that the band eventually became known for, and all of the dramatics start to suddenly make sense, don’t they?

Musically, it’s hard to deny that the base of A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out is by-the-numbers pop-punk that owes a lot to Fall Out Boy and New Found Glory’s straightforward, hardcore-infused rhythmic approach (“I Constantly Thank God for Esteban” even has a moment that kind of sounds like a pop version of Cave-In near the end). There’s certainly also dashes of emo proper and older indie rock (the band’s name is a reference to songs by both Name Taken and the Smiths). However (and thank Vegas for this one again), the album also toys often with both dance music (the first six proper songs) and baroque/show-tune instrumentation (everything after the intermission). I like to think that this is meant to reflect the disparity between the new-school dance clubs and the Rat Pack Vegas of old. This odd chemical mixture of influence also has to do with the fact that Panic! shared practice space with lots of post-hardcore, metalcore, and death metal bands, and quickly found themselves bored by the limitations of those sounds (I wouldn’t be shocked to hear that they shared practice space with the stultifying Escape the Fate– the two bands formed the same year).

The result of all these influences is a truly boundary-pushing record. I wasn’t expecting myself to say this about Panic! at the fucking Disco, of all bands, but at the same time I can’t deny that they were doing things that other bands would be copying for years to come. “Fall Out Boy rip-off” was one of the most common insults lobbed at Panic!, but by the time of Infinity On High it was clear that Fall Out Boy was taking lots of inspiration from Panic!’s electronic tinkering, and Folie a Deux‘s maturity can in part be linked to Panic! showing that it was possible to integrate strings and piano into emo-pop structures. It’s hard to imagine 3OH!3’s vocoder-drenched scene pop without “Nails for Breakfast, Tacks for Snacks” laying the groundwork, and even harder to imagine a version of later Paramore records that didn’t borrow from Panic!’s obvious eclecticism (a unique example of influence coming full circle– the band had selected Matt Squire as the producer for Fever based on his work on Paramore’s All We Know Is Failing). And of course, the first Cobra Starship album is a by-the-numbers carbon copy of the first half of A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out (Pete Wentz must have thought if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it). I mean, consider these examples in as negative a context as you want. My point is that A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out was, in several regards, new territory.

SIDENOTE: I AM SO SICK OF WRITING THE EXCLAMATION MARK IN THIS BAND’S NAME.

And the songs themselves? Do they hold up? The answer is “yes,” but with some obvious caveats. For example, Brendon Urie’s vocals were probably considered extremely polished by the standards of the scene at the time, but now that we know how good of a singer he truly is, some of his caterwauling on this record is borderline painful. “I Write Sins, Not Tragedies,” is a borderline unimpeachably good pop song, but Urie’s wailing during the bridge and the outro goes on for way too long and is kind of grating. There’s also the matter of how glossy this album sounds. Sure, everything is crisp and clear and comes through in the mix how it’s supposed to, but I would have loved some grit and heft in the guitar sound on occasion (the climax of “I Constantly Thank God for Esteban” and the guitar strikes during the intro of “Build God, Then We’ll Talk,” for example). Forward-thinking and lyrically capable as it may have been, “Nails for Breakfast, Tacks for Snacks” is a sonically disgusting track that has gone from being a mild annoyance to causing me to physically withdraw when it comes on. And although “There’s A Good Reason These Tables Are Numbered, Honey, You Just Haven’t Thought of It Yet” has an infectious jauntiness to it, it’s both lyrically and musically a bit too precious for me to take seriously, at worst sounding like an actual show tune rather than simply borrowing aspects of one.

These concerns are outweighed by the punchiness and exhilaration the rest of the record offers. I don’t mean to insult Ryan Ross’s lyrical prowess whatsoever (and several of the best moments on this record are so clearly him, from the extremely provincial Vegas references in “Build God, Then We’ll Talk” to the “Dear studio audience, I’ve an announcement to make” aside in “The Only Difference Between Martyrdom and Suicide Is Press Coverage”), but Wentz’s fingerprints are all over this record, for the better. “Press Coverage”‘s “so young, desperate for attention” refrain had to have been tweaked by him, and the song feels both more earnest and more snide and sarcastic because of it. Hell, the title of that song (an esoteric quote from Palahniuk’s Survivor) feels like a Fall Out Boy lyric itself. There’s so many great/borderline-aggravating lyric-vocal-interplay bits on this record, though: there’s that moment in “Lying Is the Most Fun A Girl Have Without Taking Her Clothes Off” that functions as both obnoxious and sly (“Did you really think I’d let you kill this chorus?”); there’s the “take the kid from the fight/take the fight from the kid” trick on “Camisado”; there’s the oblique criticism of their peers in “I Constantly Thank God for Esteban” with the “If this scene were a parish, you’d all be condemned” line; and there’s the too-clever-by-half Sound of Music interpolation in the bridge of “Build God.”

In many ways, “Build God, Then We’ll Talk” is the record’s masterpiece. A tale of an ill-fated attorney and virgin within the walls of a decaying motel on Fremont Street, the song haphazardly sways between borderline-ballad moments and freewheeling heaviness (well, relatively speaking), while constantly building tension and then sweeping the rug out from under the listener with the surprisingly subdued climax. It’s like a pop-punk version of what their Vegas peers in Curl Up and Die would accomplish that same year with their post-mathcore opus The One Above All, the End of All That Is.

And of course, special attention must be paid to “Time to Dance.” While it’s no longer my favorite song on the album, I do have to admit I still get super stoked when I hear that “I say shotgun, you say wedding” bit– delivered with the perfect amount of conviction and properly backed up by a swirl of keyboards and punchy pop-punk.

Although I’ve harped a lot on the high-end, studio-manufactured sound of the record, by no means do I want to take anything from the performances on this album. Drummer Spencer Smith doesn’t often get a chance to shine, regularly denied fills and restricted to light touches like the snare work on “Esteban”, but he’s got a great moment with the wicked, almost Dresden Dolls-esque bridge in “But It’s Better If You Do,” which is joined by a great, thickly-mixed walking bass line (performed by either Brendon Urie or Brent Walker, depending on who you ask and who’s more pissed off at the time). Ryan Ross and Urie kill all the guitar work as well– I’m sure there was more than a little bit of post-production done to make it sound smooth, but the guitar solo in “Esteban” and the extremely tight octave chords on “Time to Dance” shine so beautifully. The dance and baroque elements are both integrated pretty seamlessly, and although the transition between the two “sides” of the album is clumsy as hell (“Intermission” is thoroughly useless) it’s all carried through by theatre kids who knew how to properly commit to anything they tried. And of course, Urie, green as he may have been, is a legitimately stellar vocalist and the band would have so much less of a personality without his pipes.

At the end of the day, am I embarrassed by my love for A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out? Ultimately, probably not as much as I’m “supposed” to be. If you’re into immaculately constructed and performed pop songs with perhaps a touch of alternative edge, you won’t be disappointed by it. I can imagine kids who bump Billie Eilish listening to this record and realizing where a lot of those ideas came from. And although the kids in Panic! at the Disco probably lack any real hardcore roots, I can’t be alone in asserting that I truly don’t give a fuck when the music is this good.