Review: ‘Death of a Bachelor,’ From Panic! at the Disco

Panic! at the Disco

“Death of a Bachelor”

(DCD2/Fueled by Ramen)

The new album by Panic! at the Disco is called “Death of a Bachelor,” but its core concern isn’t death so much as the afterlife. Brendon Urie, the band’s emphatic mind and mouthpiece, wants to know what happens in the wake of a bacchanal, when the wildest urges thrash only in the rear view. “Welcome to the end of eras,” he sings on “Emperor’s New Clothes,” sounding rueful as well as relieved: Farewell to all that, but not without a highlight reel.

If Mr. Urie, 28, sounds like someone adjusting to new circumstances, there may be good reason for that. He’s a couple of years into married life, which imbues songs about being lonely while in love, like “House of Memories,” with an intriguing frisson.

Meanwhile, another union in Mr. Urie’s life has officially been torn asunder. After a series of personnel shake-ups, his band, formed in 2004 by childhood friends in Las Vegas, recently scaled all the way back to a solo act. (As an amusingly blunt credit in the CD booklet puts it, “Panic! at the Disco Is: Brendon Urie.”) Not that the album, which was largely produced by Jake Sinclair, sounds any less Day-Glo spectacular than the group’s past dispatches.

Panic! at the Disco has always favored a style both steroidal and slick, and Mr. Urie isn’t out to reinvent it here. So if the album’s title is meant to evoke “Death of a Ladies’ Man,” the 1977 album by Leonard Cohen, the analogy never scratches past the surface. A larger touchstone, especially on the title track, is Frank Sinatra — though Mr. Urie doesn’t have the vocal subtlety or the empathy to flesh out his emulation.

What he does have, now as ever, is panache: He’s a firecracker of a frontman, unafraid of strident commitment to a garish conceit. On “Victorious,” he evokes both the flamboyant swagger of Queen and the mechanized gleam of Daft Punk. On “L.A. Devotee,” he proudly sings of “drinking white wine in the blushing light.”

Mr. Urie has no problem reframing circusesque debauchery, a lyrical trademark, in terms of past indiscretion. It happens on “Don’t Threaten Me With a Good Time,” which hijacks a twangy guitar riff from the B-52s, and “Hallelujah,” which mercifully has nothing to do with Mr. Cohen’s best-known song. (Instead, it’s a power-pop gloss on a gospel idea.)

It’s in these flickers of conflicted Dionysian feeling that the album has a sense of purpose, beyond what Mr. Urie describes at one point as “the symphony buzzing in my head.” To that end, it’s fascinating to consider his premise on “Crazy=Genius,” a relationship battle royale with a thundering tom-tom beat. “She said you’re just like Mike Love/But you’ll never be Brian Wilson,” he reports, and it’s easy to imagine just how much that line would have stung.