![]() ![]() "I guess a lot of people don't like talking." Ross is more upfront, describing high school life as "vicious". "I had a lot of fun talking to people," he shrugs, visibly uncomfortable. He describes his childhood as a "suburban American life", but at the age of 12 he was diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and put on prescription drugs, which rendered him "a vegetable" for the best part of two years. Like Brandon Flowers of the Killers, Urie grew up in a Mormon family in Las Vegas. Nevertheless, the front pair of Panic have backgrounds that sound straight out of emo central casting. The emo tag stems from their association with Fall Out Boy's Pete Wentz, the impresario of emo, who discovered the band and signed them to his Decaydance label, and whose own fans provided Panic's initial audience. ![]() Modern emo fans, the stereotype holds, wear black and look depressed Panic's early gigs featured vaudeville showgirls and people being fired from cannons. It's debatable whether Panic were ever really "emo" in the first place. ![]() "But then you hear those albums and it's, 'Fuck, this is really good.'" ![]() "When you're in junior high school and into punk rock and skateboarding, you rebel," he says. Brendon Urie had a similar road-to-Damascus moment listening to his parents' records. For Ross - Panic's main songwriter - discovering the Fab Four was a "mesmerising" moment, which led him to his current listening: the Beach Boys, Dylan, the Stones, the Who. The seeds of their musical shift were sown in 2006, when they began playing the Beatles' Eleanor Rigby in their live set. Like the Tap, Panic decided to "come back to Earth before we lost it all". Initially, faced with the pressure of following enormous success, they holed up in a Nevada cabin, ditched their guitars and drums and proceeded to make songs Urie describes as "orchestral", which sounds very like the scene in This Is Spinal Tap in which bassist Derek Smalls declares "hope you enjoy our new direction" as the band unveil Jazz Odyssey. "You don't realise how long three years is until you go away and write an album," ponders Ross, the reflective yin to Urie's livewire yang. When the band made their debut, they were punky teenagers now aged 21, they listen to "classic rock'n'roll". they really don't hate everything" - will follow their own trajectory. sounds like it would be better appreciated by an older audience, Panic hope their fans - who guitarist Ryan Ross says "are impressionable, but open to things. Panic's recent British dates saw blue-haired teens plastered on alcopops rocking gently to their unlikely but effective cover of the Band's 1968 song, The Weight, while after we talk in Boston they will play to a crowd of 5,000 screaming girls. Though it entered the charts at No 2, and has sold 600,000 copies, it has sold more slowly than its predecessor on both sides of the Atlantic, suggesting that a youth subculture associated with self-harm and teenage alienation is struggling to come to terms with songs that owe more to the Beach Boys and the Beatles than to My Chemical Romance.Īfter initial confusion, perhaps the fans are coming round. Odd., has seen Panic take a curious career swerve into classic 60s rock. Their debut album, A Fever You Can't Sweat Out, sold 2.2m copies following its 2005 release, establishing the Las Vegas quartet as the rising stars of emo. Panic's latest challenge is to win over their own audience. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |