Panic!'s energetic theatrics go in new directions
Panic! At the Disco has been a performing band for less than a year, but it's skipped Rock 101 and headed straight to the experimental phase.
Sunday night at Avalon the Nevada-spawned quartet -- augmented by a cellist and keyboardist -- played a pleasingly bizarre hourlong set that encompassed the group's 2005 debut ``A Fever You Can't Sweat Out. "
It's clear why the group picked the Dresden Dolls to open some dates on this tour. Like the Dolls, the members of Panic! are not content to simply run with the emo-pop-punk gang currently consuming MySpace.com bandwidth. The teenage musicians favor puffy, high-collared Victorian-era dress; they spike their wordy, angst-ridden rants with cello and xylophone; and they give their songs such comic-pompous titles as ``The Only Difference Between Martyrdom and Suicide Is Press Coverage ."
After being announced by an MC and two female performers -- who periodically popped up portraying everything from marionettes to lap dancers -- Panic! took the stage playing that zippy number about clamoring for the spotlight. Like all the tunes that followed, it was powered by an aggressive cleverness, the kind teenage smart alecks with a knack for witty wordplay revel in.
That energy carried into their performance, whether they were bashing away indelicately but with heart on simpatico covers of Radiohead's ``Karma Police" and the Smashing Pumpkins' grandiose ``Tonight, Tonight , " or playing their own ``Camisado," which prompted one of many mass singalongs with frontman Brendon Urie .
The show stalled during an ``intermission" that featured the vaudevillians prattling on about each band member. It was needless, unfunny padding: people dressed up as wenches and butlers delivering such faux-``Teen Beat"-style revelations as ``Brendon's favorite candy is Reese's Peanut Butter Cups!" or ``He's a virgin!"
But the crowd of mostly teenagers -- many of whose parents hung in the back -- happily ate it up. And if for some this was their first rock concert, they could have done much worse than this ecstatic and ambitious if not entirely well-conceived performance. Because underneath their frilly shirts, drama-club idiosyncrasies, and arch attitudes, the musicians of Panic! are lovable precisely because they're trying to do something different, even if they don't know exactly what it is yet.
