Paramore have rebuilt their house again – and they’ve settled in right away. Standing taller than ever, on ‘This Is Why’, they’ve taken the same raw materials that have informed their songwriting for ever and added some new building blocks from the things informing their life now, 20 years on from when they started out, and adapted the sound of Paramore to suit where they are now with grace.
Paramore are no strangers to making a musical about-turn; in fact, they’ve trained their fans to expect it. But the more likely reason they’ve endured and grown with each genre shift and new era is because they do it so well every time – there’s no hint of selling out or following trends, just undoubtably intentional growth. When they released ‘Paramore’ in 2013, it was ‘a bit pop’ – so in 2017, they released ‘After Laughter’, as glossy a pop record as they come. But not in a Bring Me The Horizon heavy metal-esque reply to the naysayers, but as an exciting, intriguing exploration of how Paramore could put their pop songwriting skills to work on something sonically different to what they’d done before.
Even after the sonic digressions of ‘After Laughter’, Paramore were still a hop a skip and a jump away from sounding like a band who could conceivably bring Bloc Party out on tour, but from the opening throes of ‘This Is Why’, they catapult themselves to the heights of the new wave as if they were always there. It’s testament to the years of influences and angles they’ve spent years immersed in but not chosen to embody that they feel so immediately at home: ‘This Is Why’s muted guitar noodles dreamily, hitting flawless dissonances near-accidentally; ‘C’est Comme Ça’ is the record’s first Talking Heads moment, with those wonderfully conspicuous staccato vocals, but nods abound elsewhere – on ‘Running Out Of Time’, guitarist Taylor York’s glitchy anacrusis pushes the verses along through a 1980s hall of mirrors before falling right into the familiar, ‘Caught In The Middle’-esque bop of a chorus: classic Paramore meets cutting edge.
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It’s a disservice to their metamorphoses to call any Paramore album the ‘most’ anything, given how smoothly we’ve seen each release come out and occupy the space it was always seemingly meant to occupy within their world. But something about the songwriting on ‘This Is Why’ are undeniably the most something, Williams both elegant and sandpaper-coarse, depending on what is called for. “I’m living in a horror film / where I’m both the killer and the final girl”, she laments on ‘You First’, a subtle and painstaking turn that revels and wrestles with its bitterness. Paramore opt for simple, striking, and forceful on ‘This Is Why’, keeping in that New Wave tradition of punchy phrases iterated and reiterated, through vivid guitar countermelodies, offbeat punctuation and pointed lyrical looping of lyrics that go beyond verse chorus verse chorus, searing each song’s character into your mind indelibly.
The divide between spiky, assertive delivery and the more subdued, intimate inflections is sharp, with little occupying the middle ground. Williams is ready and willing to take aim at men abusing their power (“Well, well, well, look at you, don’t you clean up nice? […] You keep your head high, smooth operator in a shit-stained suit” in ‘Big Man, Little Dignity’), her words ringing out with sardonic, stunning assuredness despite the sugary melodies they weave. Similarly, Figure 8’s dizzying, liquid beginning (very ‘After Laughter’-esque production) falls into a suitable maelstrom of some of the heaviest, most straightforward guitars on the record as the vocals are buffeted around the song.
But when Williams goes introspective, the sonic divide flares up; a lot more wary to share, it seems, the musicality evokes the door into her psyche just left ajar as much as her singing does. ‘Crave’ joins the canon of Paramore songs about growing up and moving through life as one of their most frenetic, frustrated and beautiful. You find yourself not quite sure whether you’re mourning what you’ve left behind or looking to the future with fervent excitement, but you’re feeling it deeply, whatever it is.
Paramore are at their most sonically vulnerable on sister tracks ‘Liar’ and ‘Thick Skull’, a pair of songs either side of ‘Crave’ in which Williams lays herself barest, the confessional exacerbated in the lightness of the instrumentals, both songs relying primarily on sparser sound and rich production. On each, Williams berates herself: on ‘Liar’, for not trusting a lover enough, and on ‘Thick Skull’, for any manner of self-destructions and fears. ‘Liar’ is a heartbreaking but gorgeously cathartic listen as Williams sings in hazy falsetto “oh my love, I lied to you, but I never needed to […] you always knew the truth” – all the more poignant given the addressee may well be playing the comforting, sleepy guitar that accompanies her.
‘Thick Skull’ is a considerably harder listen with no lovely resolution in sight, but as Williams luxuriates, trudges through lessons not learned, “come on, give it to me”, Paramore admit they’ve not figured it all out – and leave us ready for them to grow more.
9/10
Words: Ims Taylor
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