We’d use that tiger-hand photo again but there’s been a lineup fallout or five, so instead, the brick wall shot..
[Video][Website]
[6.00]
Andy Hutchins: What a weird career trajectory Hayley Williams has had, from fronting a late-2000s version of No Doubt to trying to break out like Gwen Stefani to coming back to Paramore and making substandard Ashlee Simpson songs with that marvelous voice. And it’s not an upward trajectory.
[5]
Katherine St Asaph: Paramore fans, like Potterheads and Twihards before (parallel to?) them, are growing up, and the band’s growing up right alongside them; now they’re graduated and adrift, shouting banged-up manifestos: if there’s a future, they want it now! It’s a canny move. Hot Topic kids need their millennialisms too — they probably need them more, in fact, than the Thought Catalogjammers — and if this resonates it’ll be huge. The bandmates, like the class of ’13, go about this task in different ways. Hayley Williams picks up an Emily Haines distorto-voice filter at H&M, tries it on for a second then ditches it for her comfier band tee and blown-raspberry stylings. Drummer Ilan Rubin plays frenzied and frequent, like he’s angling to be the star job applicant and also maybe Dave Narcizo. The guitarists bum around until the bridge, when they finally get it together enough to produce a riff. Only about 60% of this works (declutter the arrangement and it’d be more like 75%; it’s like they’re trying to compensate for shed bandmates.) That’s nevertheless well past entry-level.
[7]
Scott Mildenhall: Given that The Future Is Rock Music, Paramore have returned just in time to meet their own demand. It’s all very meta. What’s great about this is the way the chorus seems to swirl around, the vocals slowing down even while the guitars get more frantic; a release, but a somehow languorous one.
[7]
Jer Fairall: Begins with the suggestion that Hayley Williams has been digging through the history of abrasive female-led punk bands, or has at least been paying closer attention to the angular parts of Yeah Yeah Yeahs songs, but neither she nor her band know how to get through a song, still, without subjecting it to arena-ready bombast. Middlebrow habits are hard to break.
[5]
Alfred Soto: Turning the future into the present is one of rock’s great themes, especially in the hands of minorities. The glaze doesn’t curdle the sentiments; when Hayley Williams sings, “There’s a time and a place to die” as fingers go up and down the bass frets and her cohorts go “ah-ah-ah,” it’s an affirmation I can get with.
[7]
Brad Shoup: I think the trick is holding onto cliches like that’s all you’ve got? Anyway, that’s not happening here.
[4]
Anthony Easton: Dull but efficient, and as someone who isn’t a Brit, for some reason dull and efficient rock music sounds better with a British accent. See the Kooks.
[6]
Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: It bears reminding that Paramore have already covered the year-of-turbulence angle in the promotional cycle for Brand New Eyes, but where that album’s lead single “Ignorance” was an uneasy tantrum, “Now” uses that inter-band tension to greater ends. Hayley Williams sounds crisper, more confident, more forceful still. She sings in a lower register than we’re used to hearing from her, which helps to sell the undercurrent of bad juju that runs through the song: hear how the delivery of “completely worthless” hangs there in the air, just long enough for you to garner real concern about what exactly’s been going on since we last heard from her. As for the remaining duo of Jeremy Davis and Taylor York, the guitar/bass tones have garnered comparisons to Metric. To these ears, there’s the continuation of their career-long homage to mewithoutYou, a bit of weird ’90s emo and, in that huge chorus, the solid riffing that they had previously won the world over with. Studio drummer Ilan Rubin may be overcompensating with the fills on this one — I’m worried about sixteen more songs of this ultrabusy snare — but for now, it works at adding an tetchy edge to an already-tetchy song.
[8]
Patrick St. Michel: Catchy use of “now,” shout-along-ready chorus and the line “there’s a time and a place to die/but this ain’t it” — this should all add up to a great Paramore single, but the band sound reserved here. They embrace a fuzzier sound that avoids the bombastic emo they built their name on, but the latter style is them at their best.
[6]
Edward Okulicz: Fuzzy punk is a potentially attractive style for Paramore, but when Hayley Williams sings “now-ow-ow-ow” like it’s a horn fanfare, you wonder if maybe they shouldn’t have gone the whole hog and done “Now” as a ska-punk number. The guitars chop and chug, but somehow everything still feels inconducive to movement. Even raising your fists would be a stretch.
[5]