Panic! At the Disco and fun. - their punctuated names may be a nightmare for spellcheckers and line editors but their performances were a delight to the young shrieking lungs standing wall to wall at the Marquee Theatre Friday night.

It was hard to tell which was more unsettling - the audience wound up to an infomercial fever pitch chanting “Fun! Fun! Fun!” or the one shouting “Panic! Panic! Panic!”

Collectors of billing minutia will note that on the Marquee’s marquee, the exclamation point’s triumphant return went unnoticed. Panic!, you’ll remember, jettisoned the exclamation point with the release of their 2008 album “Pretty. Odd.” But now that dot and stem have returned, even if two of Panic’s former members, including primary lyricist and sole songwriter of the group’s biggest hits, Ryan Ross, have not.

Some may interpret their revisiting the sound of their platinum-selling debut “A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out,” as opposed to the sound of their barely gone gold sophomore album as a sign that true panic with an exclamation point has taken hold of the enterprise. But you wouldn’t have known it from Friday’s performance. Singer Brendon Urie, drummer Spencer Smith and two hired hands really gelled, adding unbridled power to songs that sometimes seemed compressed-to-death on that Panic! debut. At the same time they captured a lot of the Danny Elfman atmospherics lurking beneath that record and the new one, “Vices & Virtues.” They haven’t reverted to wearing face makeup but they were wearing vests, which doesn’t so much suggest Urie as ringmaster of a dark carnival as it does a singing waiter at Bobby McGee’s.

It’s only when Urie went rogue with some of his stage banter that you really got the sense he’s still working things through or trying to elicit sympathy from the audience, whether self-describing himself as “lame” or trying to come on to the largely under-20 audience by forgetting the words to Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On.” Just before “Let’s Kill Tonight,” Urie sat at an organ and did this phony church sermon about setting fire to the dance floor that didn’t really connect at all with the song it preceded, but no one really seemed to care as long as the hits kept coming.

If there’s a formula to the Panic! sound, it’s generally that the verses of songs contain all the interesting melodic variations, while the singsong choruses roll along like some Big Country or U2 anthem from the ’80s. When dynamics generally build and drop out, Urie’s gently pounding piano and voice are left to carry the day. This is best showcased on a song like “Nine in the Afternoon,” on which they attempted a Kinks-like vaudeville number but, in truth, came off straddling a fine line between Queen and Michael Bubl�.

Hey, what do you expect? They’re from Vegas!

Midway through the set, Panic! brought Nate Ruess and Andrew Dost of fun. back onstage to perform the song “C’mon” that both bands released as a joint single. It was a generous gesture from the headliner, especially when Urie confessed he did little more in the joint writing session with the duo than watch the other two whip the song into shape. It would probably be a good time to mention that fun. killed the audience every bit as effectively as Panic! did, with the audience dutifully singing along without prompts to every available-as-a-download song.

You would’ve thought that native son/currently New Yorker Ruess, also formerly of the Format, had been gone for two years instead of the eight months it’s been since fun. sold out the Nile, Ruess gamely pacing the stage like a motivational speaker beneath the flashing fun. sign. When roars of approval greeted the mere mention that fun. had a new album coming out soon, he beamed like a guy who gave out party invitations to the whole school and the whole school showed up on his doorstep. He led what changed from a four-piece to a six-piece band from song to song as Dost seamlessly changed from trumpet to keyboards.

“On this tour, we’ve been mostly playing to zombies who just stand there. But you people aren’t zombies. You are very much alive,” Ruess said. Perhaps no other audience could’ve better understood the cathartic “Take Your Time” which closed fun’s set. This song is a treatise about the end of The Format and about his coming to terms with the group’s perceived failure. “If that’s true, then what the (expletive) have I been doing the last six years? How did I end up here? How did I find love and conquer all my fears?” The song ends with the assertion that he is better now because he has forgiven everybody. And everyone at the Marquee had a chance to show they still believe in him and that he is not just “a boy inside a voice.”

It was a moment of real emotion that demanded an encore but had to be the final word from fun., “C’mon” not withstanding. It should be noted that a moment of real emotion like that never turned up in the well-paced and equally well-received Panic! set. The closest attempt to a contemplative moment was the bland acoustic number “Always,” which much of the audience reacted to as if it were a song sprung from a graduation memory book. And maybe for some it was.

That’s where there difference between the two acts lies. Ruess, barely all of 23, seems to write all-ages songs for whoever can identify with them while Panic! seems to know they’re writing specifically for not fully grown adolescents, playing to that audience with its banter and flippantly titled songs.

One wonders if this audience will change its preferences faster than Panic! does.

Thanking the older people in the audience for bringing their kids to the show all the while hating it, Panic! placated that demographic with an irony-free and totally straight cover of Kansas’ “Carry On Wayward Son.”

Forr�s: http://www.azcentral.com/thingstodo/music/articles/2011/06/18/20110618panic-at-the-disco-funreview-tempe.html

A koncetr�l k�peket itt tal�lhattok: http://www.azcentral.com/photo/Entertainment/Music/19262