The album can be fun to listen to in hindsight, with lyrics like "Maybe if my heart stops beating it won't hurt this much" that are so bathetic, they're almost charming. The genre, which was of itself near-extinction, catered to the adolescent whim and evaporated into obsolescence just as quickly. Their first album, the monolithically emo All We Know Is Falling was a relative non-success. Each of their albums is a product of the music they'd been listening to the previous year - the alternative breakthrough bands of that time - while still sounding invigorated rather than derivative. They are, in other words, a recurring one-hit-wonder band. They move neither with the torrents of rock and pop, but to where the two camps intercede. Paramore's is instead entirely intentional. Those 'blurred lines' one-hit-wonders seem to satisfy a certain cache by accident. The "too pop for rock music and too rock for pop" hits such as Foster the People's " Pumped Up Kicks" and Gotye's " Somebody That I Used To Know" may have given the respective musicians enough money to last them through their retirement, but they've yet to successfully apply this algorithm again since. Consider the one-hit-wonders of the past half-decade, for instance. In the recent history of popular music, we've seen the charting of this not-quite-neat duality, but only in short bursts. They are, as member Taylor York has said, "too pop for rock music and too rock for pop." Paramore is one of music's more successful products because of this enduringly successful duality. Throughout all these little nudges, the band has stayed anchored to their picture of the alternative, to the formative memories of jamming to Radiohead and Elliott Smith together as teenagers. One that would ensure them the perfect marriage between the alternative and the mainstream between rock and pop.įrom their angsty emo beginnings, to their flirtations with tropi-pop and '80s revivalism, they've been fulfilling pop music's caches and phases since the mid-noughties. Despite each of the band's records seeming to represent a different era in the Paramore continuum, since 2007's breakout Riot, the band has relied upon a similar formula. She swapped her significant orange hair for blank signification and made the first etchings on the band's tabula rasa. The previous version was tied up neatly with a Grammy winning single from the apt self-titled record (since its subject matter was about growing up in the band itself), but their latest may be their most impressive yet.Įarlier this year, we saw Hayley Williams brush herself off from a car wreck in the "Hard Times" music video and emerge from it with white hair. From the back of their previous self-titled effort, which the band described as 'genre-neutral', a new evolution of Paramore has emerged. They survived rockism into poptimism, Hawthorne Heights into Haim, and this year, they've returned once more from blank slate beginnings.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorCheryl ArchivesCategories |