I hear you makin' all that noise about the world you want to see

Continuing my trip back through the 2017 album charts.

19/05/17 : After Laughter - Paramore


Our second visit with Paramore and I really quite liked the last one, so I'm looking forward to this.

Yeah - I liked this. It has the same bouncy indie-pop vibe of our previous visit but this seems more lyrically upbeat - it's all got a slight weird reggae-ish beat to it which takes a bit of getting used to, but all in all I'd say it works quite well. I was strongly reminded of the MUNA album which I really like, so I suspect they must have been listening to Paramore in their formative years. 

We're at #4 with a new entry in the charts this week on the start of a ten week run, which pleasingly features a drop in every week - and they followed it up a month later with a three week run, all of which were spent at #91. The rest of the top five were Harry Styles (a new entry), Ed Sheeran, Rag'n'Bone Man and Paul Weller (another new entry) with the next highest new entry being J Hus (#6).

Wikipedia tells us that this is their fifth album, it's a complete change of direction from their previous albums and, apparently, the lyrics aren't quite as upbeat as I thought they were (but they're still a lot more positive than I remember our previous visit being). They'd also had a change of personnel, with drummer Zac Farro returning (he'd left in 2010) and bassist Jeremy Davis leaving - apart from that there's surprisingly little there, apart from a track by track breakdown which is completely random. Critically, it was very well received with quite a few people thinking the change of direction was a good move and it made a load of year-end lists. Commercially, it definitely went down best in English speaking countries, getting to #9 in Canada, #7 in New Zealand, #6 in the US, #4 in Ireland and #3 in Australia but it also got to #10 in the obvious pairing of Mexico and Austria.

Quite bizarrely, discogs.com tells us that you're going to have to spend FIFTEEN QUID to get a decent copy of this - what's going on? And if you want the pink marble vinyl version (which I suspect looks very nice) it's going to set you back £80. I enjoyed this, but the Wikipedia entry makes me interested to listen to their earlier stuff to compare it - and the good news is that I'm going to get to meet a couple of them so we have all that to come. 

26/05/17 - Back to where it all started


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