Panic! at the Disco, "Death of a Bachelor"

Panic! at the Disco

“DEATH OF A BACHELOR”

DCD2 Records / Fueled by Ramen Records

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.

If 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 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. 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 Urie isn’t out to reinvent it here. 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.”

Urie has no problem reframing circusesque debauchery, a lyrical trademark, in terms of past indiscretion. It’s in these flickers of conflicted Dionysian feeling that the album has a sense of purpose, beyond what 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.

ON TOUR: July 30, 2016 — McMenamins Edgefield, Troutdale; www.etix.com.

— Nate Chinen,

New York Times