There’s something about southern bands that often take their northern counterparts to the musical woodshed when it comes to musicality and having their own sound.
The rock band Paramore is one of these southern-based bands that showed this virtuoso ability in performing an engrossing two-hour set at Barclays Center on Tuesday night.
The roots of the band go back to 2002, when vocalist Hayley Williams, then 13, moved from her hometown of Meridian, Mississippi to Franklin, Tennessee, where she met brothers Josh Farro and Zac Farro at a weekly supplemental program for home-schooled students.
Now, more than 15 years later, the lineup includes Ms. Williams’s sinuous and romantic voice mixing well with effervescent guitarist Taylor York and the thunder-clapping Zak Farro on drums.
Promoting their fifth LP from 2017, “After Laughter,” the band had the audience spontaneously partying, dancing, crowd surfing and singing along to every skillfully crafted, intricately versed performance.
Ms. Williams is an outstanding poster child throwback to the time when rockers put on great live shows unlike the current music climate where unless you’re a Youtube sensation, DJ, country-western star, pop artist, or rapper, it’s just not worth stitching together jam members to form a rock band like your parents would have after watching the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show.
Not when GarageBand can undoubtedly make one person sound as marvelous as let’s say four.
The opening act, Foster the People, while less impressive, played smoothly and were tight, and political. After their last song, they made an articulate call for empathy, kindness, and New York-style diversity in our fast-growing un-westernized society. Ms. Williams also encouraged her die-hard fans to take “these two hours to just forget about everything” that’s going on in the country.
From the start, each Paramore song had thousands of concertgoers diving right into the lyrics. Keeping everyone in high spirits, the most thrilling songs the band played were: “Told you so,” “Misery Business,” “Grudges,” “Crushcrushcrush,” and “Ain’t it fun.”
May Paramore, one of the few critically and commercially successful rock bands left out there, keep up their robust shows.
