MUSIC: Panic at the Hard Rock
They’re like a kid in last year’s hand me downs, arms jutting out of their sleeves, pants riding high above their ankles, their growth spurt largely unaccounted for.
Watching Panic at the Disco live at the Hard Rock outdoor stage on Thursday night was like seeing an entirely different band from just two years ago, one that’s dispensed with all the theatrics in place of a more advanced, less snarky musical acumen that’s the equivalent of someone skipping a couple grades in high school.
The problem is that their audience hasn’t always kept pace with the band’s development.
As Panic aired out tunes from their latest disc “Pretty.Odd,” a well-crafted stab at wistful pop rock buffered with ‘70s a.m. radio melodies, new songs were generally met with polite, yet reserved applause while the crowd waited for the band to get to the hits from their platinum-selling debut, which elicited shrieks of approval.
Granted, some of it had to do with the relative youth of the audience: There were plenty of moms and dads in the house, clutching their youngsters by their side, and it’s to be expected that the ‘tween set might not have the patience for Panic’s more ambitious musings.
Still, it’s a bit of a bummer to see a band develop and not get as much of a response as they probably would have had they simply rehashed their first disc.
This is the central problem for emo-oriented bands: None of them have definitively proven that they can take their audience with them as both mature.
There’s the long-running Dashboard Confessional — who also played on the bill Thursday, earning a solid response for hits like “Screaming Infidelities” — who’ve managed to maintain a sizable fan base, but from the onset, that band appealed to a slightly older crowd than the Fall Out Boys and Simple Plans of the world.
Will Panic eventually be the exception?
Well, they’re trying pretty hard to get there. Clad in natty suits, bounding about the stage, they certainly seem more and more confident and comfortable each time around.
And the setting suited them well, outdoors on a breezy fall night. Why aren’t there more shows at this venue? It’s great this time of year.
“Hey moon, please forget to fall down,” Panic frontman Brendon Urie sang, standing beneath the thing. “Hey moon, don’t you go down.”
Here’s hoping Urie and Co. continue to heed that advice themselves.
If the Panic dudes are starting to become veterans of the touring band ranks, they were joined on this night by one of Vegas’ newer entries to the national scene: young piano pop upstarts The Cab.
They distinguish themselves from the overstuffed emo ranks in one crucial department: They possess a flame-throwing guitarist in Ian Crawford, who shoots sparks all over the bands bouncy, R&B inflected tunes.
At the Hard Rock, they practically burst apart at the seams with enthusiasm.
“This is the biggest show we’ve played here” singer Alex DeLeon announced at one point, recalling how the band got their start at now-shuttered, all-ages coffeehouse/concert club the Rock N’ Java just a few years ago.
“This is our hometown,” DeLeon asked at one point. “Do you know who we are?”
These days, more and more are answering in the affirmative.
