Paramore

Paramore’s sprightly ginger singer Hayley Williams has declared, via the medium of t-shirt slogan, that_ “Paramore Is A Band”_. She also started wars with the media that she perceived to be trying to demolish her band’s emerging career through sniping and bitterness.

Sometimes people in the public eye, when facing unwanted or unwarranted adversity, should just smile politely, toe the line and let their skills do the talking and walking. At least that way people will be able to make their own minds up without having to take sides with something as superficial as their favourite band or their favourite magazine.

The sad thing is that Paramore really don’t have the legs to muscle their way to the top of the musical tree at the moment. Their music, whilst powerful and sturdy, fails to kick a real hole into the side of anything in particular. Strip away the emo stylings of their music and the songs are plain and dreary. Verse, chorus, verse, chorus, SCREAM FOR ME LONDON, whatever.

It’s as memorable as it is forgettable.

While the songs from their first album, All I Know Is Falling, are hooky as hell (and yes, this must be what hell feels like) and get you singing along and pumping your fist at an absolutely middling tempo, you know there’s something inherently wrong about it all.

There’s a certain calculated nature to each and every song that just leaves an element of suspicion lingering at the back of your mind, hammering on your skull to the sound of, “WRONG! BAD! WRONG! BAD!” You slowly get the feeling that singing along to this is wrong… and bad.

Maybe it’s the secret paedo in you, struggling to get out, that keeps you here. You’re surrounded by lots and lots of pre- and barely pubescent girls who are idolising that scrawny idiot onstage as she hollers like a Southern preacher woman on heat. You know they can do so much better than her. You’re here, after all.

Ultimately, you give it up and go back to the bar.

You don’t need to hear any more songs that sound the same played with different words. You don’t need to see her band of nameless, faceless, pointedly personified goons nimbly hurling themselves across the stage. You don't need her over-rehearsed lines being professionally projected beyond the back of the auditorium, just like she's been told to do so many times.

You don’t need any of this. You’re out of there.