Paramore vs. Avril Lavigne

Look, I know I tend to be hard on mainstream music acts who write their own material. Paramore serves as a good example – it’s actually really tough to make interesting mainstream rock music without relying on outside songwriters. Every song on Riot! sounds exactly the same. They don’t have the chops or the imagination to do anything other than write the same 3 and a half minute long punky pop song. I just can’t understand the critics who give stuff like this a free pass if not necessarily an outright endorsement while savaging someone like Avril Lavigne – are we actually judging music here, or the personalities who create that music? Paramore probably has more musical talent than Avril does, and maybe by that token they “deserve” success more – but Avril doesn’t work by herself, and the people who help her are real talented. They know the importance of variety with this kind of music. Paramore doesn’t, and neither do most of these self-made young bands who find themselves on the charts.

 

What I’m getting at here is that I’m an agnostic when it comes to music – I don’t care how an album is made or what deception or marketing is used to promote it. I just care if it’s good. The Best Damn Thing is good and Riot! just isn’t. End of story. You’d be shocked at how many people feel otherwise.

Thrice

A few years ago I decided that I was way beyond the times music-wise. Really, I did pretty much listen to nothing more recent than the 80s. And I really wanted to understand what interested the people around me. It’s always been my philosophy that it’s better to get something than it is to not get it, so I always try to see what makes a particular artist good. Pretty much every genre has its geniuses, I think. So I spent a lot of time listening to “emo,” punk-pop, mall punk, metalcore, etc. The stuff that had its heyday around 2004 and now seems to be quickly and mercifully disappearing. But I did find a lot of it that I liked – since much of it IS highly commercial music, much of it is also pretty well-written catchy.

One of those bands, maybe the one I listened to the most, at least within a pretty brief period – so much within a couple months that I think they’re still in my top 10 artists and songs played – was Thrice. It’s been a long time and now I decided to listen to them again.

The verdict? Most of The Illusion of Safety is almost as good as I remember – the tunes are okay, but the riffs are razor sharp and the songs come and go fast enough to keep things fresh. Most metalcore bands, at least the ones that have become popular, sound either like nu metal with even more depressing lyrics or like Gothenburg with short songs and sung choruses, but Thrice on this album managed a pretty smooth fusion. I can see the singer’s voice grating some people – he sounds like he’s 16 years old – but there’s worse out there. Like I said, the riffs are good and about half the songs are pretty catchy.

On the other hand, I used to love The Artist in the Ambulance, but it doesn’t sound so good to me these days. The riffs as a central part of the tunes are pretty much gone. The songs are a little catchier, but the instrumentation on a whole is a flat, and the tunes are even harder to differentiate than on the previous album. It goes nowhere – it’s not more sophisticated than Illusion and it’s also not as fine-tuned. If anything it just sounds like Finch. Disappointing.

I’m sure that enlightened nobody, as Thrice is a band whose time in the spotlight has come and gone, and they weren’t critically acclaimed to begin with. But it’s worth checking out The Illusion of Safety if you want to hear some solid metal-punk-pop, in that order. I kind of wish they had dumped the singer and just played Iron Maiden for the kids. Thrice’s most recent albums, Vheissu and The Pretentious Index Vols. I & II have led them to be classified, at least on Wikipedia, as an “experimental rock band,” so I’m curious about that. If I find them sufficiently interesting I’ll write some more.