Album Review: Panic! At The Disco - Too Weird To Live, Too Rare To Die!

Always fond of the vaudevillian and the histrionic, in their earlier days it was near impossible to disentangle this element of their music from the overly wrought angsty and verbose theatricality of so many of their peers. With Too Weird To Live, Too Rare To Die! (a title lovingly lifted from Hunter S Thompson's Fear & Loathing In Las Vegas) Panic! At The Disco have grown into their idiosyncrasies and now own them.

Always ambitious, past incarnations of the band seem, looking back, to have been hampered by generic affinity – a pop punk band can only do so much (so too a slightly older pop punk band who had now found The Beatles) but unburdened this ambition abounds, the transition to the cutting edge of pop is complete.

However, having not decreed themselves to be the saviours of rock'n'roll, it doesn't seem incongruent when Panic! At The Disco deliver an album of quirky wigged out pop. Similarly, the ego of such big, arty pop isn't let loose. At ten songs in a little over half an hour it doesn't overstay its welcome; it doesn't vainly clasp at opus-like length in search of the cutting edge. It's just weird, slightly nerdy – a hybrid of sci-fi leaning, classically-infused, incredibly taut, expansive pop.

Early indications of a penchant for excess, blossoming across subsequent releases, now seem fully realised; this is weird and rare and still pretty odd… and thoroughly impressive.