Photo credit: Allison Hade
Paramore’s Hayley Williams has spent the last decade in the odd position of being too big for her own band. Since the group released its breakthrough album, Riot!, a decade ago at the height of emo’s foothold on alternative radio, critics have tried to frame the band as a glorified solo project for its ebullient singer—a suggestion she’s had to push back against so many times that “Paramore is a band” became a kind of unofficial slogan for the group.
Still, as members have come and gone over the years—usually accompanied by bitter recriminations and, in the case of bassist Jeremy Davis’ departure in 2015, a lawsuit—it’s sometimes been hard not to wonder why Williams even bothered with the band anymore, especially since her own solo star was ascending (she’d been featured on a couple of big pop singles and appeared in a Taylor Swift video). Paramore’s fantastic 2013 self-titled album had shown that they had ambition beyond alternative radio, landing them a pair of giddy crossover Top-40 singles, “Ain’t It Fun” and “Still Into You,” and their latest record, After Laughter, runs even further in that direction, eradicating nearly every last trace of punk from their sound, instead going all in on the kind of modernized ’80s pop sounds that are all over the radio right now. The album seemed like a concerted effort to cement Paramore’s place on Top-40 radio. So far it hasn’t worked out that way.
If After Laughter’s surprisingly poor performance on the charts has made the band reconsider whether there’s a place for them in the pop landscape, Paramore’s performance Friday at Milwaukee alternative radio station FM 102.1’s annual Big Snow Show concert at the Rave revealed that they’ll always have a loyal following among rock fans. The sold-out crowd responded most rapturously to the guitar-heavy throwbacks from Riot! and 2009’s Brand New Eyes, but they also danced eagerly to After Laughter’s polyrhythmic jams and swayed along to a pair of consecutive slow ballads (“Hate to See Your Heartbreak” and “26”), as well as a cover of a lesser Fleetwood Mac single, “Everywhere.”
|
|
Williams was in a chatty mood. Paramore shared the bill with Dashboard Confessional—whose hour-long set banked far too much on unreleased material from an upcoming album—and Williams remarked about how surreal it was having a band that she grew up with open for her group. She also commented on Riot!’s 10th anniversary, reminiscing about 2007, the days of tight pants and wild bangs. And for the encore, she gave each member of her band an extensive introduction—including several guys who have never been in any of the band’s press photos or videos—insisting that, collectively, they are Paramore.
Mostly, though, she demonstrated how much she still enjoys fronting a band. The night’s most memorable moment came when Williams stopped the band’s biggest hit, “Misery Business,” mid-song and selected somebody from the audience to finish it for her—a very game, very excited fan named Mallory—who absolutely crushed it. It’s an uncommonly generous gesture, a singer essentially outsourcing the concert’s big payoff to a fan, but Williams has already spent a decade living out her own rock star fantasies. For a few minutes, she was able to let somebody else experience that high.
