If I Start Reading Twilight As A Result Of This, Please Shoot Me.
This is the band Panic At! The Disco (girls, did I put the exclamation point in the right spot there?):
If that picture doesn’t say “This band are awful, and in a grab-you-by-the-collar-and-yell-AWFUL-in your-face-way-awful” then I don’t know what does. Holy crap. It’s like emo exploded all over the damn place.
And so now, that hilariously crap picture burnt into your memory, I want you to hold it in mind while I mention that PATD (that’s how the kool kidz and 14-year-old girls refer to them) probably broke up last year (oh no–what’s a girl to listen to on her way to see Twilight at the cinema for the 15th time?) when leader Ryan Ross and second guitarist Jon Walker left the band to start their own group.
For this new group, they recruited some friends, including the sorry snot who produced the last PATD album, as well as poor old/young Alex Greenwald, singer of another teenage heartthrob band gone defunct, Phantom Planet. Now then, I want you to imagine how terrible, how supremely awful and beyond the limits of bad such a band might sound.
Now click this link to hear them. (Click advisory: reading the comments after clicking will likely result in geometrically high numbers of your own personal brain cells suiciding in protest).
Uh so yeah. If you would’ve given me 10 million probable reference points for a band spun off of Panic At Th!e Disco, “Early Zumpano or The Kinks or perhaps even Phil Spector” would be right around not on that list because seriously.
And sure, go ahead, dismiss this band–The Young Veins, they’re called, and yes, I seem to have buried that inadvertently by being snarky further up–as simply doing some weird homage-by-numbers. But I think you’d be incorrect to do so. Listen to the way the chorus in the first song I linked goes nowhere you’d expect it to, and carries off a rather unexpected and sort of difficult note progression very nicely. Check out the way the second song I linked “Cape Town” does the same thing and then does the AC Newman thing (yeah, AC Newman of The New Pornographers) of putting so many meters in that chorus that the thing should collapse but doesn’t.
There’s some serious craftsmanship going on here, and this debut record is–if not earth-shaking in any way, shape, or form–really, really fun and interesting and enjoyable to listen to.
Popnarcotic 