Under Review: Paramore - "Brand New Eyes"

Artist: Parmore

Album: Brand New Eyes

Release Date: Sept. 29, 2009

Label: Fueled By Ramen

Paramore’s journey to their newest album, “Brand New Eyes,” has been long and winding complete with success and failures. The band’s meteoric rise to rock n’ roll darlings after their 2007 release “Riot!” was followed by a hard fall back to earth and talks of a break-up less than a year later. Fans were left pondering the future of a band who was just scratching the surface of their potential.

But we’ve been told what doesn’t kill you will make you stronger, and “Brand New Eyes” may have proven the legitimacy of that very statement.

In short, Paramore is alive. Kicking and screaming to me more exact.

From the opening track, “Careful,” the band sets a different tone packed with aggression, passion and sincerity that “Riot!”* was missing. The album acts as a confession of the turbulence the band endured over the last year. You can hear the scars healing with each and every song. Lead singer Haley Williams’ vocals are amazing on the album, but it’s her emotion that brings out her best performance to date. Tracks like “Brick By Boring Brick,” “Turn It Off” and “All I Wanted” (which might be the best female vocal performance I have ever heard) show Williams letting everything go with soaring vocals and powerful lyrics as the listener sits in on her own personal therapy session.

“Turn It Off” is especially revealing, as Williams paints a picture of a band in turmoil and how she saw everything slipping away as she sings “The tragedy/It seems unending/I'm watching everyone I looked up to break and bending.”

The song titled “Misguided Ghosts” is especially intriguing as the band goes for an organic, folk type sound that grabs your ear and won’t let go. It almost comes off as an impromptu recording that turned from a b-side song to, quite possibly, the best track on the album. The haunting acoustic melody and Williams’ stripped down vocals make this a standout track on an album full of great songs.

But “Brand New Eyes” does more than give the listener insight into a once self-destructing band; it reestablishes Paramore as punk band with pop sensibility instead of a pop band that dresses like a punk band.

“Ignorance,” “Looking Up,” “Where the Lines Overlap” and the aforementioned “Careful” and “Brick By Boring Brick” bring the band back to an energy filled sound, reminiscent of “Riot!”’s “Misery Business” and “For a Pessimist, I’m Pretty Optimist.” Even elements from there very first single, “Pressure,” from their debut album, “All We Know Is Falling,” can be heard with some of the heavier riffs used on the albu. These type tracks are the ones that made me stand up and take notice of the band to begin with; to have them return to such a style had me grinning from ear to ear.

Everything that was wrong with “Riot!” has been fixed with “Brand New Eyes.” The band shows with this album that their more than another pop-punk group molded from the same machine as the rest of the genre and, instead, has written a mature, revealing and hook heavy album that will be the essential record in the groups discography, elevating the band both lyrically and musically above all the rest.

Final Score: 4/5 *Let me clear this statement up a bit. I liked "Riot!" but found myself skipping tracks to get to some of the tracks listed above. I found that they were trying too hard to make me like the hooks and not all of them resonated like the ones on this album. I can honestly say I didn't skip a track on this album and I was glad I didn't. "Riot!" was strong debut, but "Brand New Eyes" is a considerable improvement.