Paramore - All We Know is Falling (2005)
Coming straight outta Franklin, Tennessee is a band that your older sister used to really like but would garner a reaction of "Oh, yeah, that one album was pretty good" if you'd ask her about them now! This album was recorded when all of its members were teenagers, with vocalist Hayley Williams being 16 or so at the time of its release, and I gotta say: Unlike a lot of other bands that release something while they're teenagers, this isn't complete and utter shit that you pretend to like just because you're friends with the bassist! This album has some fuckin' classics on it: "Pressure" HAS to be a live staple for them if it isn't already (I've never seen them live), "Emergency" is great, "Here We Go Again" (dat funky bass) and "Whoa" are two of my favorites that never seem to get enough love from their fanbase or the pop-punk community as a whole, and who could forget about the calming and nostalgic "Franklin"? This album has a "I'm 16 and know my life is about to change completely soon" vibe all over it, and holy shit, if you somehow don't remember, that feeling is fucking -terrifying-. The whole feeling of "oh no, my friends are gonna go off to separate colleges!"? Don't fucking remind me.. Ugh. I feel like writing a lot of people that I probably shouldn't.
Hell, if we could dial things back for just a moment, the lyric "Could you remind me of a time when we were so alive? (Everything has changed) Do you remember that?.. Do you remember that?" from "Franklin" really hits home. When I was about 13, so let's place this story in 2007, I remember going to a family friend's house, and lo and behold, there was my female friend (let's call her) Mandy. I had never talked to Mandy one-on-one before, just with friends and the sort. I remember really getting to know her as we sat on the back porch eating queso + chips and thinking "this is a friend I'm going to have forever", and it's so juvenile: At one point, we were talking about technology, she brought up something, I said "I think that came out in 2001" and she asked "Were you even born yet?" teasingly and I had to roar back "OF COURSE I WAS!!", but there was also this five year old kid there, let's call him Nicholas. Nicholas was pretty cool for his age and wasn't at all annoying. He spent some time with us, and I decided I was going to buy him a pair of those Hulk Hands or whatever that were a toy at the time for his birthday. I never did. Flash forward almost seven years and I leave my small town for a few months, and during that time, I reflected on past friendships and how my friendship with Mandy just naturally faded over time, my best friend had gotten married, and little Nicholas, now about 13, had been heavily bullied so much that he shot himself in a school bathroom. Everything had changed about that small town to me in just a matter of months. I occasionally think about Mandy and Nicholas and just think of that one night that probably meant nothing to them, but I'll always remember as a memory of when things were so much more innocent. "And when we get home, I know we won't be home at all. This place we live, it is not where we belong, and I miss who we were in the town that we could call our own. Going back to get away after everything has changed.."
The only thing I can really say negatively about this album is that the production dampens it a bit, keeping the songs from soaring like they should. That all being said, this album's got catchy riffs, memorable choruses/lyrics, and a genuinely great and powerful vocal performance from Hayley Williams that is really impressive given her age at the time, especially since she didn't sound like a 16 year old. In fact, this entire album doesn't even sound like it was recorded by a few teenagers aside from the occasional "eh" lyric. It's really a quite admirable effort from everyone involved when you break it down to the songwriting, guitarwork, and all of that good stuff. I wouldn't consider it a classic album for the genre, but I do think it's very essential for their discography to see where exactly they came from, and even past all of that, it's just a good album, and that's still more than I can say about a lot of bands that released material this early into their lives. I mean, have you heard some of those shitty "they're only 13 but can SHRED!" metal bands on YouTube? God.. I can't say much because I can't play guitar, but still. Maybe I'm just mad at them because I was too busy being an emo fuck at 13 to play guitar. Why play guitar when I can whine about my problems to people on the other side of the world on MSN Messenger??
7/10
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Feel free to check out the song previews/buy this album using my Amazon Associate link!
