Be My Escape

Now I’m of consenting age
To be forgetting you in a cabaret
Somewhere downtown where a burlesque queen
May even ask my name
As she sheds her skin on stage
I’m seated and sweating to a dance song on the club’s PA
The strip joint veteran sits two away
Smirking between dignified sips of his dignified
Peach and lime daiquiri…

A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out is the most interesting album of the Emo era. Whether it’s the best is up for debate, it’s certainly in the Top 5, but when it comes to being original and forward-thinking, the crown is clear. Other bands magpied more obvious influences into their sound: hardcore, metal, Pop Punk and Indie, but Panic! were the true visionaries. Combining the lighter side of Emo with pure Pop, cabaret, baroque, far-sighted electronic and a deeply considered aesthetic, they created a release that sounds fresh to this day. It’s a singular, visionary album.

Hailing from the leftfield location of Las Vegas Panic! famously started from humble origins as a Blink-182 cover band. While still in high school the band would go through various lineup changes but the Urie-Ross axis was its core. Brendon Urie was the voice, the face, Ryan Ross was the songwriting and conceptual engine. Ambitious from the start, they bloomed quickly from their Pop Punk roots, experimenting constantly and spreading their demos on the nascent Livejournal and Purevolume websites. This lead to Fall Out Boy bassist and scene mogul Pete Wentz finding them. He was immediately impressed and signed them to his Decaydance- Fuled By Ramen imprint, with Panic! becoming his first- and by far most impactful signing.

Recording their debut, syntherising all of the ideas that had propelled them, Panic were never going to be just another Emo band. Despite barely being out of High School their ideas and horizons were gigantic.

Well, we’re just a wet dream for the webzine
Make us it, make us hip, make us scene
Or shrug us off your shoulders
Don’t approve a single word that we wrote

Panic! Were mixing styles and genres in a way that was truly ahead of its time. Strings, beats, samples, riffs and solos. No one cares about genre anymore, it’s weird and crass. Being defensive of a little plot which is “yours” and needing to defend it from interlopers with musical rules and expectations is seen as reactionary. Anti-social. Everyone listens to everything now, enjoying Tori Amos, Green Day and LCD Soundsystem on the same playlist wouldn’t raise an eyebrow. Panic!, of all the Emo bands, precursored that world.

They were smart, but they were also sexy, they were knowing. Ross had a wizened nature to his lyrics that belied his youth. He’s been there- done that, fallen in love at the burlesque club and already got the divorce. The music is genderly ambivalent, Urie sings swaggeringly about Testosterone Boys and Harlequin Girls. Cooing to the listener, “Is it still me that makes you sweat? Am I who you think about in bed?” There’s lust and love, in a way that to a teenager, fumbling towards their first hook-up, seems oh so adept and sophisticated. Aesthetically the album reaches for opulence, decadence. “Lying Is the Most Fun a Girl Can Have Without Taking Her Clothes Off”. Scene music yes, but with fine china vases, Venetian facemasks and hidden boudoirs of satin. It’s music for Ouran High School Host Club AMVs, with swirling roses, glancing eyes and puckered bishounen lips. If the world of other Emo bands was bleak and isolated, Panic!’s was aspirational and inviting. Grab a glass and join the party.

Taking a little bit of time to warm up after release, it was the now-iconic video for I Write Sins Not Tragedies, a typically characterful song of bridal infidelity, that propelled the album into a pop megahit. Peaking at a very impressive 7 on the Billboard 100. The I Write Sin’s video is excellent, filmed on a pretty modest budget, but packed with character and life thanks to the bands clarity of vision. Urie, dressed in his Ringmaster outfit, is rightly one of the defining images of 00s music. From utter novices to headliners, literally leapfrogging the competition.

By Fever…’s release in 2006 the stage had already been primed by the crossover success of My Chemical Romance and Fall Out Boy in 2004 and 2005 respectively. The kids were activated, waiting for the next big thing and Panic! stepped into that spotlight with aplomb. Everyone was obsessed with them. This gorgeous band with a truly fresh spin on a genre at the peak of its cultural relevance. I have distinct, well loved memories of visiting friends rooms to find them suddenly papered in Panic! posters. Fans started scrambling to incorporate Victorian bric-a-brack and vintage vibes into their looks and styles. It seasoned and broadened tastes as the Emo kids grew. Meanwhile the obvious slash-dynamics between Ross and Urie, an essential component of the bands early appeal, powered Panic! along the seedier but ultra-passionate backlines of the internet. Other artists might have been bigger sales wise, or had more consistent peaks across multiple albums, but Panic! hit the highest hysteria of fandom response when Fever… released. The definitive 00s crossover success, from MySpace to your stereo.

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Panic! no longer exist, having ended as a project in 2023, but the band have have perhaps the most controversial legacy of all the big Emo bands. My Chemical Romance retreated into silence and breakup after Danger Days, before exploding out again in 2019 to rapturous critical and popular acclaim. Fall Out Boy broke up, but redoubled in 2013 with a fresh, top-40 outlook that might not have enthralled older fans, but brought in plenty of genuine new ones. The two fanbases now seem to exist quite happily alongside each other. Paramore matured, becoming Indie-Pop darlings and Hayley an icon of female-fronted Alt music. As for Panic!, Ryan Ross left in 2009 and Panic!’s output took a clear dip with his departure. It was fine, but not exactly inspired. Following a series of modest albums and more lineup changes Urie morphed the band into a solo-act in 2015. Taking his sound in an unashamedly Pop direction. Not Pop Punk, just Pop. Multiple studio songwriters Pop. Hmm.

This decisive change, stripping away the old and embracing the new, brought Urie huge rewards. 2016’s Death of a Batchelor debut at Number 1 on the Bilboard 200, which was matched by 2018’s Pray for the Wicked. There’s a hard to quantify but weirdly strong argument that in terms of sheer streaming, popularity and word of mouth he might have made Panic! as big as they were in the 00s- or perhaps just shy of it, which is mind-blowing.

But Panic also became a different band. Fall Out Boy changed and met with similar chart-topping success- but they still played a healthy string of singles from their older albums. They were still the boys from the Take This To Your Grave cover. Panic! became something… else. By 2022 Urie was playing only the absolutely unavoidable I Write Sins Not Tragedies and Pretty.Odd.’s Nine in the Afternoon as scraps to the older fans. Since 2018 those were the only two tracks he played live from the Ryan Ross era. Which is absolutely baffling. Fever… is one of the most important, enduring albums of its era, and the band who put it out seemed completely ambivalent. Embarrassed by it even. I understand why fans felt aggrieved, like Urie had ripped the skin off something they once loved and was now singing his crass High High Hopes karaoke dressed in it. Ross, by contrast, has been silent on social media and absent from the music scene. Still beloved by the hardcore Panic! fanbase he remains the King across the water. A symbol of what could have been.

The drama is unavoidable. Of course, of course- they’re a 00s Emo band after all. But the quality of A Fever You Can’t Seat Out will endure. Forward thinking, catchy and smart. This is an album to turn the heads of cynics and critics. To prove that good Emo was never about iteration and copying. That the scene provided a space for painterly, wild creativity. To combine Moulin Rouge with a MySpace page and create the most beautiful clockwork Frankenstein seen yet on the internet.