A Pretty. Interesting. Look at Panic at the Disco

It's a long road from the sun-kissed, neon-lit streets of Las Vegas to Abbey Road, the fabled London studio where so many of The Beatles' revolutionary sounds came into being between 1962 and 1970.

But it's a journey that four young lads from the American Southwest have undertaken—literally. The result is Pretty. Odd., Panic at the Disco's sophomore effort. Not only has the Vegas-based band appropriated some of the sounds and textures of The Beatles, but Panic (having dropped the exclamation point from their moniker) even went so far as to record parts of their latest album at Abbey Road.

Accordingly, Pretty. Odd. sounds as if these musicians—who're barely out of their teens—dropped the entire Beatles catalog into a blender, added some modern alternative ice and the horn section from Sonia Dada, then churned out a new-millennium Liverpool smoothie.

Lush orchestration. Woodwinds. Strings. Harmony ... scads of harmony. Definitely pretty. (We'll get to the odd part momentarily.)

This ambitious undertaking is quite a departure from Panic's Fall Out Boy-lite debut, 2005's platinum-selling A Fever You Can't Sweat Out. While that pop-punk effort was pretty much standard-issue emo—equal parts angst, irony and self-congratulatory cynicism—this one finds the band replacing one kind of overindulgence with another.

Gone are the world-weary winks from teens who're already bored with sex and partying and, well, pretty much everything. Gone as well are tongue-twister titles such as "Lying Is the Most Fun a Girl Can Have Without Taking Her Clothes Off." In their place is a wide-eyed (or maybe bleary-eyed) nod to '60s psychedelia. It definitely feels happier, even if most of the time it's virtually impossible to figure out what's going on.

Pretty. Different.
Pretty. Odd. leads off with a message to the band's millions of fans: "We're so sorry we've been gone/We were busy writing songs for/You don't have to worry/'Cause we're still the same band."

I beg to differ.

Not only has Panic reached into the past for inspiration, but the band has filed down the gleaming, razor-sharp bitterness that cut through so many previous tracks. Consider, for example, this zinger from "Lying Is the Most Fun ...," a jealous rant from a guy whose former girlfriend is having sex in a car with someone else: "Is it me that makes you sweat?/Am I who you think about in bed?/ ... I've got more wit, a bitter kiss, a hotter touch, a better f---."

You won't find anything so bitter on Pretty. Odd. Apparently, the band has grown tired of slinging such explicit lyrics. Guitarist and lyricist Ryan Ross recently said of his approach to the new album, "I try to think of the person who's worked an eight-hour day, the person who gets in the car and puts on their radio. I'd like them to hear a song that makes them feel happy for three minutes rather than something that makes them more depressed than they already are. We're not afraid to write about love or being happy. We have an entire culture that is either provocative or negative. It's so geared toward being shocking that it no longer manages to shock. They've pushed it as far as they can go both sexually and in terms of anger. Which is why we're here, to provide something different."

So instead of f-bomb laden envy, we get lyrics that read, "When the moon fell in love with the sun/All was golden in the sky/All was golden when the day met the night." Definitely kinder, gentler stuff for the most part, although a few melancholy meditations on broken relationships do show up here and there.

More frequently, though, Panic's lyrics seem even more jumbled and unintelligible than, say, "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds." In the upbeat, jangly "Mad as Rabbits," frontman Brendan Urie croons, "Come save me from myself walking off a windowsill/Or I'll sleep in the rain/Don't you remember when I was a bird/And you were a map?/And now he drags down miles in America, briefcase in hand." Huh?

Perhaps lines like those—and there are a lot of them here—hold some subjective significance for the band. But trying to pin down objective meaning is an exercise in futility amid Alice in Wonderland-like whimsy. And the band knows it, singing, "I can't prove this makes sense, but I sure hope it does."

Partly. Sunny.
Occasionally, glimmers of emerging social consciousness do shine down. "If all our life is but a dream/Fantastic posing greed/Then we should feed our jewelry to the sea," Urie sings on "Northern Downpour," for example. These moments reveal a band that's questioning the deceptive claims made by our culture, such as the false promise that materialism inevitably leads to happily ever after. Spin reviewer Barry Walters also noticed some of these positive themes and commented, "Pretty. Odd. lives up to its title because it dares to be optimistically beautiful at a time when sadness and ugliness might have won them easier credibility."

Which is not to say that the album is Pretty. Perfect. Passing references to cigarettes, drinking and a couple low-key allusions to sex pop up. And there's also one reference to a "drug farm entrepreneur." Apart from that, I didn't find any other direct drug references. Still, the deliberate nonsensicalness of some songs, it could be argued, might mimic allusions to drugs found in some of The Beatles' later work. Elsewhere, one track repeats the phrase "never gave a d--n" 20 times.

Still, I don't think Panic at the Disco is likely stir up too much, um, panic with its sophomore release. Perhaps the removal of the exclamation point after Panic unintentionally symbolizes the growth this Las Vegas-meets-Liverpool quartet has obviously experienced.