IN REVIEW: Panic! At the Disco - "Viva Las Vengeance"

 

With the release of Viva Las Vengeance, Brendon Urie has now released almost as many albums as a solo artist as he did with his former band. That said, there's a palpable attempt at recapturing a full band feel for the seventh Panic! record; foregoing the convenience of digital recording, Viva Las Vengeance was recorded to analog tape in an attempt to hearken back to the classic glory days of glam rock. 

That's a noble decision, one that sets this record up as a fun throwback to a more and more forgotten era of music, a nod to the massive riffs and thick grooves that defined a generation of music lovers. The truth is, while the sentiment is nice, the songwriting often doesn't quite live up to the lofty comparisons this album aims to evoke; take the star-reaching Don't Let the Light Go Out, a rather flat ballad that tries to cover up its shortcomings with auditory callbacks to '70s power ballads and oppressive vocal overdubs. This approach is the default setting on Viva Las Vengeance, its cover appropriate in that borrowed sounds and harmonies get stapled haphazardly onto the songs in an attempt to elevate them past mediocrity or, at the very least, hold them together.

As much fun as it is to play "spot the classic song being cribbed from" (if you're of a certain age, chances are you'll identify elements from T. Rex, Cheap Trick, Sweet, Queen, Elton John, Ramones, Kiss, Thin Lizzy, The Police, and plenty more throughout and with minimal mental stretching on your part), there's only so much enjoyment to be taken from such an exercise when trying to hear anything original. The only distinguishing factors here are Urie's often strained falsetto and sometimes cringe-inducing lyrical excursions (Middle of a Breakup has perhaps the biggest sheesh factor here). Otherwise, Viva Las Vengeance is basically a 44 minute episode of '70s Rock Cosplay.

Again, this wouldn't be as problematic if the songs were up to snuff, but there are more misses than hits here; as liberally as the overdubs are used, the underlying song structures are rather skeletal, resulting in those callbacks and overdubs being asked to do more of the heavy lifting than they really should. A basic riff here, a simple beat there, a shit ton of vocal overdubs and nostalgia triggers everywhere, a formula that makes minimal effort to accomplish anything deeper than surface level charm.

I could save you a lot of time and just say you're better off listening to a classic rock playlist, but that's perhaps just a little too harsh; this isn't an offensively bad album, just one that's hampered by overproduction and an over-reliance on borrowing from past hits. I acknowledge that I'm not Urie's target audience, and there are droves of drooling fans who won't do a double take at even the most obvious rip offs; hell, for that matter I think my favourite track here is Sugar Soaker, which smashes a bastardized version of the intro riff from Crosstown Traffic into Sweet's Little Willy, and this is probably the most blatant rip off I'll hear this year.

Ultimately, the downfall of Viva Las Vengeance is the simple fact that, for the majority of the track list, the most effective way for me to describe the songs is by naming better songs that a vibe, riff or melody is lifted from. As big a fan of these bands as Urie may be, his attempt at becoming this generation's version of that is clumsy, a little reckless and perhaps even a bit misguided; this is a record that doesn't succeed at anything as much as it does in stripping what little originality Urie had completely away.

August 19, 2022 • Fueled By Ramen

Highlights Viva Las Vengeance • Sugar Soaker • Sad Clown