paramore

Familiar With Emo, Intimate With Upbeat

Around 10:30 on Wednesday night, Paramore’s short and generally sharp set ended, and a few thousand people started filing out of the Roseland Ballroom. Outside on West 52nd Street, there was a barricade and, behind it, a row of eager faces.

Ticketless fans, eager for a glimpse of the band members? No. Ticketless parents, waiting to retrieve their children. If only the parents knew what had gone on inside the club, they would have been ... quite pleased, actually. Paramore is a fizzy emo band led by a tireless, clean-scrubbed singer named Hayley Williams, who is still a few weeks away from her 19th birthday. And onstage, she avoids epithets and embraces exclamation points. Eyeing the hoppers and screamers in the sold-out crowd, she said: “You guys are looking fantastic! Let’s keep it up!”

Paramore is loosely affiliated with the world of emo. The band, from Franklin, Tenn., was nurtured by the record label Fueled by Ramen (which also nurtured Fall Out Boy and Panic! at the Disco), and the members customarily spend their summers on the Warped Tour. But Ms. Williams knows that the least essential thing about emo is its emo-ness, so she plays down the emotional turmoil to focus on energy and kicks instead. “Misery Business,” the band’s breakthrough single, must be one of the peppiest revenge songs ever written. (In fact, the word “misery” appears in the lyrics only once, in the self-referential first line: “I’m in the business of misery, let’s take it from the top.”)

Ms. Williams generally avoids both the violent imagery often associated with rock ’n’ roll provocation and the sexual imagery often associated with pop provocation. Not coincidentally, she is, among other things, a Christian rock star; in the liner notes to “Riot!” (Fueled by Ramen/Atlantic), the band’s most recent album, all the members thank Jesus first. And while Ms. Williams avoids overtly evangelical lyrics, many of the band’s love songs (like “Miracle!” and “Hallelujah”) also sound like conversion narratives.

In June, in a remarkable post on the band’s LiveJournal site (paramoreband.livejournal.com), Ms. Williams expressed her faith during a discussion of “Misery Business,” which includes the line, “God, does it feel so good.” She explained that when she composed the lyrics, she was taking the Lord’s name “in vain,” but said that her perspective had changed. “i might have led some of ya’ll to believe that i take my saviour lightly. and i don’t,” she wrote, adding that now, “when I am singing those lines, i’m telling God that it feels good to stand up for myself and be victorious after long months of confusion and pain.”

Wednesday’s concert wasn’t quite as engrossing as that confession. The best Paramore songs are buoyant, guitar-powered anthems like “Whoa” (which went, sadly, unplayed) and “Born for This,” as well as “Misery Business,” the final encore, and “Crushcrushcrush,” the new single. By contrast, a too-long cover of “Faces in Disguise,” by the influential emo band Sunny Day Real Estate, seemed to test the patience of some young fans.

Near the end of the show, Ms. Williams announced that “Riot!” had just earned a gold plaque, for shipping half a million copies to shops. That’s pretty good, but the band is expected to do better; in a recent article in this newspaper, executives from Atlantic Records talked about their high hopes for Paramore. And it’s not hard to imagine that the band’s music, like its fan base, might expand. Ms. Williams may yet find a use for her Southern accent, which can be heard between songs but not — yet — during them.

For now, though, Paramore gets by on good cheer, even during seemingly uncheerful songs. Near the end came “Pressure,” from “All We Know Is Falling,” the band’s 2005 debut album. “I’m sitting all alone, feeling empty,” she sang. And then, without pausing or changing her facial expression, she yelled, “All right, New York City, let me see everything you got!”

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