Panic! At The Disco – Pray for the Wicked

Panic! At The Disco, which has always sounded like Radio Disney with a few “fucks” thrown in in order to remain edgy – ya know, for the kids – is just an insufferable one-man-show now. It’s only corny-ass-jazz-hands-extraordinaire/biggest douche in the universe Brendon Urie, who is back again with more dizzying auditory upchucks for his idiot fan base to buy up, which they’re obviously doing. In the first week of its release, the new Panic album, Pray For The Wicked, sold a staggering 180,000 copies, moving a dead, piece-of-shit abuser (XXXTentacion) out of first place on the Billboard charts, which says a lot about the crumbs of the crumbs of rock ‘n’ roll we have left, doesn’t it?

Speaking of lack of rock ‘n’ roll, while Panic! At The Disco has always been lacking in that department, Pray For The Wicked somehow manages to sink them even lower. The new record sheds all the guitar-soaked Warped Tour-sounding trappings that their fans seem to hold dear. Instead, Urie goes mostly all electronic with some horn/fart noises scattered throughout. Horns can be great, but these arrangements aren’t thought out, or maybe they’re too thought out. The horn arrangements, which seem to be the centerpiece of the album, fall flat. They don’t sound big or different, which I think was the intention.

The record is very High School Musical. Urie recently did get off a Broadway run in Kinky Boots, which could be why he decided to go full-on Broadway-bro-down here, but the results are so much cheesier than Panic’s usual Sesame Street songs. It’s a very egocentric album, very showy and douchey. While the super-fans of Panic! At The Disco will somehow try to justify this album and say it’s just “different,” some of the more logical fans out there with a brain will come to their senses and just say it “sucks,” ’cause it does.

Lyrically, the album tries to be too clever and is anything but. Even the album title, Pray For The Wicked, which is so on the nose, tells the listener exactly what to expect. What we end up with are so many godawful God clichés/metaphors, which are the worst, especially when they’re set to homosexual show tunes and not rock ‘n’ roll. Apparently, Brendon Urie used to be a Mormon and is still dealing with that. What a weak-ass honky. What he doesn’t understand, though, is he comes off as a parody of himself. This album sounds more like something Trey Parker and Matt Stone (South Park, The Book of Mormon) wrote as a joke because they were bored one day rather than a serious album by a big-selling serious artist in Alternative Rock that dorks actually take seriously. Brendon Urie is basically a South Park character – he’s hilarious, a joke, and doesn’t he understand why.

Panic! At The Disco
Pray For The Wicked
[Fueled by Ramen]