Well who knew? Likely to be in the top 10 with this album release, mainstream radio airplay, prime time TV adverts andthey sold out Wembley Arena in a day. Oh wait, I did. When I reviewed ‘All We Know Is Falling’ in 2005 I said the band would have major label backing by album number 2 and “could easily be poster boys and girls for a new music generation”. Does anyone want to touch me? No? Shame.
Gloating aside, it didn’t take a genius to work out Hayley Williams would be a marketing man’s wet dream. And so it has shown to be true, as ‘Riot!’ sold by the bucketload and the band have become true stars in their own right. If they originally rode in on the coat-tails of the Fueled By Ramen charge, they’re now way out in front of all of those bands. Some would even say they’re bigger than Fall Out Boy – would FOB sell out an arena tour in just one day?
So just how good is ‘brand new eyes‘? Is it 5/5 worthy as the mainstream press have declared, pretty much en masse? The answer is a resounding no. In places this is awful, cliched stuff. It’s lyrically naive, childish even, while the slower songs could have been written by any band out there. Real third rate stuff. But then that’s Paramore all over. They’re yet to write a consistently good album and for a band that will be remembered as one of the ‘scene’s’ biggest bands of a generation, that’s pretty unforgivable. Take the three albums together and you have one absolute belter. Dissect this one and you’ll find a string of singles-in-waiting that sound absolutely huge. MASSIVE. But amongst the gold are some really, really poor tracks that make this anything but flawless.
As is usual by Paramore standards, the album flies off to a great start. ‘Careful’ and ‘Ignorance’ are monster hits and will have you singing along in no time. The quicker songs are pretty much all great on this record. It’s a belief I’ve had since ‘Riot!’ – when this band push the pedal to the floor and sing with passion and feeling they’re unstoppable. So why they chuck in sub-par ‘ballads’ is beyond me. case in point – ‘The Only Exception’, ‘Playing God’ and ‘All I Wanted’ which are all dull. The record is so much better when the pace is picked up as is shown by ‘Brick By Boring Brick’ and ‘Feeling Sorry’, the latter of which is arguably my favourite song on the album.
So while the good outweighs the bad, there are two things that really irk me on this record. The first is the careful placement of obvious crowd interaction. It’s so obviously been done on purpose to allow Hayley to interact with the crowd at a live show, but it stands out like a sore thumb on the album. Check out the ‘ba bas’ on ‘Brick By Boring Brick’ which beg to be sung along to and the ‘woah’s on ‘Looking Up’. Both are needless and don’t really fit. First time I heard ‘Looking Up’ I couldn’t believe what had just been tacked on the end. The same thing happens with the ‘sing it back to me’ line in ‘Where The Lines Overlap’. Then there’s the lyrics, which at times are so bad I try and focus on something else. For someone who moans relentlessly on Twitter about the hardships of being in a Platinum-selling band, are you trying to tell me everything is really OK as Hayley suggests in ‘Looking Up’?
Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t a bad album. The good songs are really, really good. The poor songs are really, really poor. Good outweighs bad. ‘brand new eyes‘ fails to live up to the hype because it’s once again inconsistent. Will the band ever write an album that’s choc-full of hits? By album three you would hope they would have done it by now. But they haven’t. Still, it won’t matter. This will sell a million, at least, and help break the band into mega-stardom. It’s been inevitable since day one so I shouldn’t be surprised. I called it after all…