Look, I liked some emo, too. Obviously Weezer and Sunny Day Real Estate, a little Get-Up Kids, and, fuck it, I owned a Jimmy Eat World album. Actually, two; tell no one. But I’ll credit myself with jumping ship at the right time; a good first wave (Weezer) influenced a decent second wave (Get-Up Kids) that influenced a passable third wave (Brand New), and, upon the emergence of the third, I fled for fear of the fourth. And because I was out of puberty.

But behold, the cash cow cometh. I’ve heard Panic! at the Disco described as dance-emo, but in truth there seems little danceable about this, all dramatic string plucks (what a budget!) and drums that do nothing beyond imitate the vocal melody. The title itself is inscrutable, suggesting that sins and tragedies are a) inherently interrelated, and b) mutually exclusive, but the video and lyrics lack many other first person references, leaving me to wonder if these titles are just drawn from a hat. Regardless, the pretty singer prances convincingly, but with sub Brandon Flowers- charisma and more ridiculous Clockwork Orange aping. The rest of the band must be ugly as fuck, though, because the camera avoids them like so much Scott Shriner.

Anyway, the song itself is, you know, just aight for me—the chorus leaps but never soars, tethered back by word-packed histrionics like “It’s much better to fix these kinds of things / With a sense of poise and rationality,” a line which is probably flooding the profiles of high school student’s instant messenger personas, but seems directly at odds with the type of tearjerking hysterics most common among Panic!’s constituents. Cynicism, the odd confluence of goth and emo culture, a decent vocabulary, and total fucking misery: this is what the popular kids are listening to these days. Go figure.

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