Panic! At The Disco - A Fever You Can't Sweat Out
Panic! At The Disco
A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out
Release Date: September 27th, 2005
Label: Decaydance / Fueled By Ramen
It is rare for a band to strike lightning. It is even rarer for a band to strike lightning twice. It is far rarer for a band to strike lightning and ignite a storm on their first try. Panic! At The Disco were fresh out of high school, having never stepped foot onto a stage - let alone a recording studio - in their lives when they were signed to Pete Wentz’ Fueled By Ramen imprint, Decaydance. People were baffled to know that a band that had never played a live show or released a single song other than some demos was the first band signed to Wentz’s label in the early 2000s. In an interview before the 2005 MTV Music Video Music Awards, Wentz said “their record is going to be your next favorite record. It’s called A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out - get it before your little brother does”. Those words were prophetic - within a year, Panic! At The Disco would go from opening for Fall Out Boy to headlining their own arena tours, a feat that took the latter several years to achieve.
From June to September 2005, vocalist Brendon Urie, guitarist/lyricist Ryan Ross, bassist Brent Wilson, and drummer Spencer Smith relocated from the suburbs of Las Vegas to College Park, Maryland to record their debut. They entered with shells of songs and the scantest idea of how to work together and make an album. The result: a genre-bending descent into madness that stands out as one of the most original and best records in what we would today call ‘emo’. The term and the genre outgrew Rites of Spring - it was destined to become intricate, whimsical, theatrical, and angsty. In thirteen songs and an album barely clocking in at forty minutes, four teenagers made something that has still never been replicated by any band I’ve heard over the last two decades. A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out is wholly unique in that sense - many have tried, but no one has ever come close to replicating its results.
The first half of A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out is comprised of dance-inducing pop-rock tracks punctuated by synthesizers and drum machines. It is amateurish in nature - you can tell that this is a band that is still trying to figure shit out - yet every decision they make works. Brendon Urie was not the powerhouse vocalist that he is now known to be today, easily hitting falsettos and commanding arenas with a “Greatest Showman On Earth” presence. But all of the pieces were in place on Fever - he delivered Ryan Ross’ lyrics with conviction and passion, even if it didn’t always break through the mix. The closest they came to a true blue “rock” track (whatever that means) was on “Time To Dance”, an emo-punk number that doubled as a treatise detailing Chuck Palahniuk’s “Invisible Monsters”.
By the time you hit the halfway point on Fever, the vibes have changed and you’ve walked down a dark alley, knocked on the back door of the seedy-looking cabaret on the wrong side of the tracks, and entered an entirely new world with songs like “But It’s Better If You Do”, emo power-anthem “I Write Sins Not Tragedies”, and dramatic album closer “Build God, Then We’ll Talk”. There’s an influence of acts like Dresden Dolls on the latter part of Fever - the act would go on to open for them on their first headlining tour - yet Panic! took the concept of bands like Dresden Dolls, put it through their own filter, and made something that had never been heard by fans of this genre before.
Every song on Fever can stand on its own, and what sets it apart is not just the music, but the lyricism of Ryan Ross. Song titles like “The Only Difference Between Martydom and Suicide Is Press Coverage” and “Lying Is The Most Fun A Girl Can Have Without Taking Her Clothes Off” are indeed attention grabbers, but you have to have the cynicism and ability to write songs that can back up titles like that. Palanhiuk and lines from Natalie Portman movies can only take you so far. But Ross is one of the most enigmatic writers this scene has encountered - how do you write about a family member’s alcoholism, trials and tribulations with such wit and gravitas at the age of seventeen as he does on songs like “Camisado” and “Nails For Breakfast, Tacks For Snacks”? How was a kid who had by then experienced so little life able to write lines like “This is the scent of dead skin on a linoleum floor/This is the scent of quarantine wings in a hospital” and get people to not only sing but dance to it?
Despite having never had any live experience or time in a studio prior to the recording of Fever You Can’t Sweat Out, the album shows massive hints at their greatness. Wentz clearly saw this when he signed them, understanding that it would take some time to emerge, but there was greatness rising to the surface. There is an immaturity that can be heard on the album, even amongst its complexity - riffs could be better, Urie’s voice could be even stronger - yet it’s the same album that made me look at the possibilities of what you could with live music and made me want to pick up a microphone as a teenager. There is a grasp that Fever still has to this day on its listeners.
Bands should grow and evolve, and Panic! At The Disco continued to release new music despite a waning lineup that eventually lost Ross and bassist Jon Walker (who replaced Wilson shortly after the album was completed). Urie and drummer Spencer Smith continued as a duo before Smith’s departure two albums later. Urie carried the flag and brought the full Vegas showman flair to the stage in arenas the world over, with songs from albums that were excellent, but were as far away from the songs that were written in a Maryland studio back in 2005. Glimpses of that time period would emerge now and then (take for example, “Crazy=Genius” on Death of a Bachelor), but Panic! would always find themselves tied back to Fever. In a way, it was a bit of a curse that Fever was so good. Even when Urie made exemplary albums like Bachelor or Pray For The Wicked, the comparisons to that debut would always come, even though the only song from that era remaining in the set list was “I Write Sins Not Tragedies”.
Nobody can predict what’s going to be a hit and what isn’t - anyone who tells you that they can is full of shit. Nobody knows what’s going to hit. I don’t think anyone - Wentz, the label heads at Fueled by Ramen, and certainly not the four teenagers from Las Vegas - thought that the little record-that-could they cobbled together over a period of three months would go on to become a global juggernaut, achieve quadruple platinum status, get them to headline arenas the world over, and become synonymous with the word “emo”. Despite its imperfections, A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out is undoubtedly a perfect album, and one of the finest of its era.
