:: Panic At The Disco - That Green Gentleman

Panic At The Disco

Taken as an album, Panic at the Disco’s Pretty. Odd. is less grating than its predecessor, yielding tracks like That Green Gentleman which feel more refined and focused than those on the scattershot debut, A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out. Lacking even a single Chuck Palahniuk reference, the lyrical side of That Green Gentleman is the antithesis of the first album’s pretension. Brendan Urie allows himself a less strained vocal with which to deliver pop platitudes – “I want to go where everyone goes/I want to know what everyone knows/I want to go where everyone feels the same” – never beating his listener around the head with melodrama, posturing or meaning. Thankfully, Urie never reaches beyond his grasp vocally, cutting out the painfully overdriven noises he had been prone to previously. The instrumentation is tight and comfortably evokes that era – which may or may not have ever existed – in which pop music was clean, innocent, and above all inoffensive. That Green Gentleman is a track ultimately relegated to the status of background filler: catchy George Harrison guitar hooks just aren’t enough to steer it from the middle of the road.