Superfluous synth noises, superfluous curse words and often superfluous lyrics (not to mention those exclamation marks) have left me not at all impressed with Panic! At the Disco’s new album Too Weird To Live, Too Rare To Die!. Coming in at just a little over 32 minutes, it’s characterised by blandness and monotony of sound – it’s often difficult to distinguish one song from another.

This is the band’s fourth album since its formation in 2004 and it displays yet another stylistic U-turn from its predecessors. It’s an attempt to top the charts and make an album which is accessible and easy to listen to and if this is their aim then they’ve succeeded. There’s nothing offensive about this album, but there’s certainly nothing outstanding about it either.

The tempo of each song is fairly identical (click your finger to the first three tracks and you won’t have to change beat between songs at all) while all ten tracks clock in and around three minutes – the shortest 3:07, the longest 3:32. Despite some good vocals from singer Brendon Urie, it’s marred by auto-tune in almost every song. Needless electronic effects get in the way on more than one occasion, with reverbs and chorus effects making all too frequent appearances.

You’ll witness a steady and fairly rapid decline as the album progresses, as the album opens with its three best songs – ‘This is Gospel’, ‘Miss Jackson’ and ‘Vegas Lights’. I’m not sure whether this is because they’re the three best songs or, just as likely, whether I’m already bored and generally frustrated by the time we get to track No. 4, ‘Girl That You Love’.

The opening track has a catchy beat and good chorus as it becomes clear from the outset that Panic! are pursuing a quintessential – or what I would call generic – American dance pop timbre. It’s a good thing all the tracks clock in at three minutes; most tracks have a promising opening thirty seconds with a catchy hook but three minutes is about the maximum I could stand for any of them.

The culmination of all that is mediocre about this album comes together in ‘Casual Affair’: poor sound production making the strings sound like a midi file; musical invention barely worthy of a GCSE music composition; and repetition of the same thing for three minutes. The whispering from the backing track – only to be described as creepy at best – is the icing on this vanilla, single-layered cake.

Too Weird To Live, Too Rare To Die! is not an entirely bad album – it has a few decent tunes to dance along to – but it has no musical substance. I’d expect this one to float around the top 40 for a few weeks, making some token appearances at Cindies, before fading into the realms of where much of today’s releases seem to be heading. It’s disposable pop at its best.