Review Summary: Classic? Not quite.
A while ago, I alluded to
A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out being a “monotonous pop-punk borefest” while reviewing Bullet for My Valentine’s
The Poison. While it’s certainly a far cry from being completely tedious, the fever feels a tad more like a cold sweat - you’re not quite as nauseated as you are fatigued. It’s hardly the classic that many remember it as, but rather a relic of the mid-2000s to be enjoyed through a lens of nostalgia. With their debut, Panic! At the Disco proves that infectious vocals and catchy hooks cannot by default save a record from mediocrity.
As a whole, there’s really not much more to describe this album than as a boilerplate piece of 2000s pop-punk that seldom pushes boundaries. For the most part,
"Fever" is held together by a few singles: “The Only Difference Between Suicide and Martyrdom Is Press Coverage,” “I Write Sins Not Tragedies,” (as overplayed as it is, the song still holds up well) and “Lying Is the Most Fun a Girl Can Have Without Taking Her Clothes Off.” Numbers like “London Beckoned Songs About Money Written By Machines,” “Camisado,” and “Time to Dance” leave your mind right after they finish, the two instrumentals on the tracklist are redundant and add very little of interest, and the quite horrid abuse of autotune in the verses of “Nails for Breakfast, Tacks for Snacks” sure doesn’t help it.
Some songs on this album come off as the band trying to sound more intellectual, while others are simply a reflection of the society around them. Take, for example, the usage of dated terms like “webzine.” If you look at it in context, that most likely refers to their MySpace popularity. It was the mid-2000s, after all. Some lines tread near a seductive territory, such as
“now I'm of consenting age to be forgetting you in a cabaret somewhere / downtown where a burlesque queen may even ask my name.” Most of the material here thankfully doesn’t go down that route, discerning itself from other albums around this time, ala
Deja Entendu. Most of the time, it sticks to Brendon Urie’s bizarre poetry, sprinkled with small traces of pseudo-intellectualism within each track. It seems as if he was spending time scouring his dictionary for big words.
Overall,
A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out is a decent enough release, but personally, it was eclipsed by the following year’s master-class
The Black Parade. Thanks to Urie’s ego and his post-release desires for a shift in style, the band was unable to outdo what they presented here, albeit
Vices & Virtues came close. Having a fond memory of this album is fine, but I doubt this is anywhere near classic status or should truly be regarded as such outside of nostalgic value.
