As “Careful”, the opening track to Brand New Eyes played, I braced for another Paramore style album; an album full of young female pop vocals that sell a sub-par pop-rock band’s studio tracks. Throughout their career, their album material has mostly just bored me. Their B-sides and some demos have been the only thing that have kept me coming back when they put some new music out.

The next two songs didn’t improve my opinion of the band’s creativity, but Hayley Williams certainly improved her songwriting and singing. For example, there’s an anger in the vocals that hasn’t been heard from her before, and it’s not just coating the entire song; it comes in at the right points, which tells me she’s writing songs with more emotion now.

“Brick By Boring Brick” and “Turn It Off” actually had more experimenting in the instrumental tracks than I had expected to hear at this point. It was refreshing to hear that, sort of. They were clinging on to their distortion-driven riffs, and that has always plagued their songs. “The Only Exception” was a first as far as songs on Paramore albums go; a fully acoustic track. It sounded very nice and like something they should do with their music more often.

“Feeling Sorry” brought an end to the instrumentally creative cluster of the album. “Looking Up” was another average fan pleaser song, and although “Where the Lines Overlap” had some chimes or some high synthesized notes that accented the song well, it just wasn’t enough to break away from the “average Paramore sound”.

The last two songs on the album, “Misguided Ghosts” and “All I Wanted”, were quite a surprising way to end the album. They are almost what I had been hoping the band would produce for quite a while now. “Misguided Ghosts” has some excellent acoustic guitar playing, and “All I wanted” had some amazing vocals coupled with guitar work that had some nice tone to it, and it steadily grew as the song progressed; something I don’t recall them ever trying out until this song.

Overall, it probably won’t be getting Paramore any new fans that hated them before this album, but it’s a step in the right direction for the band. Their music is starting to mature, and it looks like their fans will have a band to grow up with.

Their B-sides for this album mostly consist of acoustic versions of songs on the album. “Decode”, however, was an original song, and it had a better guitar tone than all the songs on the album; that sort of “hiding the more experimental music” seems to be typical of Paramore. Most of the tracks were more musically diverse when recorded as an acoustic version, and they seem to have much more replay value. The band seemed to have spent more time on this album’s acoustic tracks than on previous albums. They still retained the structure of their originals, and possibly even the tempo and some vocal tracks. They probably could have thrown in a demo or two like they did for the MVI version of Riot!, but five studio acoustic tracks is quite a feat for most bands. It’s a decent set of tracks.

On September 29th, Jimmy Eat World announced on Twitter that they would be working with Mark Trombino once again for their next batch of songs. Mark had worked with the band since 1995, helping them put out some of their most successful works such as Static Prevails, Clarity, and Bleed American. However, during the production of Futures, the band decided to go with a different approach and hired Gil Norton. While the the Stay On My Side Tonight EP was produced by Trombino, the relationship between the band and Mark had become strained, and they did not get together to produce Chase This Light.
There’s no guarantee that Mark Trombino will be on board for the entire production, the fans were happy to hear that they were back together, since the band’s most creative music was produced by him. If all goes well, the upcoming album will be the band’s fifth album with Trombino, and their second produced in their Tempe, Arizona studio.

In addition to this announcement, Jim Adkins played one of the new songs on September 17th, at the Modified Art Center in Arizona. “Walk Away” sounded like a slower Clarity-era song with a few modern touch-ups. Although the song sounded great, it was played without the rest of the band, and it will probably have a different instrument arrangement for the new record. This is potentially the third new song for the album, “Stop” being the first, originating from the Chase This Light demos, and a currently untitled track that was played for the first time at the KROQ Weenie Roast in may.