Williams has masked prosaic lyrics with her booming voice in the past, but without a melody as her guide, she comes across as uninspired. Instead, we’re given schoolyard taunts (“na-na-na-na”) and a summary of Williams’ recent medical history. When Williams adopts the flat affectation of Dry Cleaning’s Florence Shaw, she crucially misses the irreverence and quotidian absurdity that make Shaw’s non sequiturs hilarious and commanding. While the jagged edges of “This Is Why” establish a jittery energy to match Williams’ punctuated belting on the chorus, songs like “C’est Comme Ça” draw too closely from their inspirations. The barking monotone of Bloc Party and the Rapture is an odd choice for a vocalist with such an arresting range. They’ve pivoted before, to Day-Glo ’80s synth-pop on After Laughter, where Williams’ impassioned frustration was a perfect fit for bright-sounding songs about being mad as hell. Yet in pursuing the sounds of their youth, Paramore lose the exuberance that launched their larger-than-life hooks into the stratosphere. “It always reminds me of getting my driving license… Bloc Party’s Silent Alarm was always on in the car,” she said on her podcast last year. The genre’s wry lyrics and crackling energy hold sentimental meaning for Williams, who grew up on the early 2000s British post-punk revival. Instead of regurgitating the gnarled mall punk of their previous records, on This Is Why they reach for the propulsive sounds of post-punk. As she reunites with bandmates Zac Farro and Taylor York, Paramore seem reluctant to retread their old rhythms: “We don’t want to be a nostalgia band,” Williams said last month. Meanwhile, on a pair of solo albums, Williams brought in collaborators including boygenius and experimented with softer, more intimate production. In the five years since Paramore’s last album, After Laughter, the jagged, sinister sound the band carved out on their earliest records has returned in the poison-laced anthems of artists like Olivia Rodrigo and Willow.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |