Live Review: Panic At The Disco, E^ST

It’s a massive coup for Central Coast electro-indie artist E^ST aka Melissa Bester to score the support slot for Panic! At The Disco, considering she hasn’t dropped a full-length record yet. It does make sense though, as this year she was picked up by their label, Fueled by Ramen. When she whipped out songs like I Don’t Lack Imagination, she seemed to have the makings of an alt-pop superstar – you can envision her, like Montaigne, becoming Australia’s answer to St Vincent in a couple albums’ time. Her latest single Alien featured some guests in the film clip’s alien suits coming out for a boogie, while she shucked off her bright yellow checked blazer for a cover of The All-American Rejects’ 2008 single Gives You Hell, which the emo-arse crowd lapped up, no surprises there. 

Panic! At The Disco/Brendon Urie (it’s just Brendon Urie) burst on stage with (Fuck A) Silver Lining because this is the Pray For The Wicked album tour, and don’t you forget it. As silver streamers fell over the crowd, Urie gyrated and danced like he just did a stint on Broadway – oh wait, yes, he did, starring in the Cyndi Lauper-scored musical Kinky Boots, a nod to that coming mid-set with a cover of Girls Just Want To Have Fun. Ten years since Panic! in an early band formation toured their second album, Pretty. Odd., in this exact same room, all Urie’s early 20s awkwardness is gone – while the fans’ still remains – and the dude is raw sex now, clad in a blazer sewn with glitter thread over shiny tight black jeans, his hair perfectly coiffed, his mic coloured gold. 

If you turned up hoping for a nostalgia tour, you were in for a major disappointment – he played one song apiece from A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out, which remains a start to finish emo jam, and their weird faux-‘60s follow-up Pretty. Odd.. What’s really interesting about that – and let’s put aside that it was maybe a deliberate choice made out of respect for Ryan Ross’ huge influence on their early albums – is that no one in the Qudos Bank Arena even really noticed. Urie behind a piano for Nine In The Afternoon went down to not much more than shrugs, but the expected late turn from I Write Sins Not Tragedies, set up by Urie’s acknowledgement that 14 years ago this song “started it all”, had even the younger members of the audience on their feet. It’s interesting that as Urie’s style has developed to its current unapologetic pop his audience has shifted too – this isn’t a nostalgia fan base returning and hoping to see their mid-teens fave played in full, or people who have been devoted since 2005, this is a new set of young people who genuinely adore this incarnation of Urie, sans eyeliner and top hat. These are young people who love clean, uplifting, but a little bit edgy pop, who may not have first been introduced to Bohemian Rhapsody by the iconic Wayne’s World scene, but by Urie’s shiny cover. 

What has remained in Urie’s work since the beginning is a sense of theatre – while he wasn’t half the showman on that 2008 tour as he is now, and he certainly didn’t lean on falsetto so much as a crutch, you can see still see his interest in spectacle, heightened emotion, heightened everything, and literal fire. It’s song after song after song, with no time for banter, Urie scrambled on top of his piano, did a backflip and weirdly thrusted, always smizing at the camera and the adoring front row. He seemed particularly pleased when the crowd followed instruction and used coloured paper and smartphone flashlights to illuminate the arena in a rainbow flag for Girls/Girls/Boys: “It’s all about love and I thank you for that.” He also wants us to know he can play guitar himself and joined his touring band during This Is Gospel, which made for a strangely intimate moment when the three wailed on their instruments heads bowed to one another centre stage. 

Still, through the set you can see that Urie’s gotten older – now he’s writing songs that are less self-reflexively ‘clever’ in that precocious teen word jumble way, but rather tight, danceable pop music for people who might see themselves as distant from the rest of the commercial pop space. While he still borrows elements from their earlier sound, what he relies on is that he’s still got a killer set of pipes, and he’s still incredibly handsome - the entire largely female crowd let out a collective swoon when he appeared almost entirely unaccompanied for Death Of A Bachelor. Urie also genuinely appeared to be having a really good time wheeling out songs from his six-record discography, with a heavy focus on new singles like High Hopes and horrifying Muppet song Hey Look Ma, I Made It, which really just seem to espouse the value of believing in yourself. It doesn’t feel like he’s doing this for anything less than the love of it. Throughout the almost-two-hour set, Urie’s enthusiasm never faded, only building to the peak of set closer Victorious, as gold glitter and more streamers rained down on the devoted audience.