So Panic at the Disco dropped the exclamation point from their name, ditched the makeup, started worshiping the Beatles and came out with a new album. I’d liked a few of their singles from their first album, but couldn’t bring myself to ever actually buy it, since I wasn’t passionate enough about what I did like to overshadow my skin-crawling hatred of what I didn’t like. Their second album “Pretty. Odd.” grabbed my attention because I fell in love with the acoustic version of “When the Day Met the Night” I found on YouTube, and so, despite my bias against the band I went out and bought it.
It’s…interesting. I can definitely hear a strong influence from the latter-day Beatles and Brian Wilson. Some of the songs, I’m shocked by how much I love them. There isn’t a single song on the album I don’t like, actually, but there’s no real distinctive style unique to the band here. It almost feels like they did a tribute album instead of trying to come up with anything new.
Has anyone else out there checked this out? I can’t help but compare it to “Sam’s Town” from the Killers. Another Vegas band with a huge first album and a second album that went in a dramatically different direction. They’re still doing well, but they were a lot more popular to start out with than PatD. I’ll be curious to see how well this album does.