Parachute – She is Love
Some guys get all the luck…
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[2.23]
Martin Skidmore: Wet pop-rock which is not unpleasant, if completely devoid of excitement or interest. The voice is smooth, the guitars are quiet, and it’s all very polite, and I don’t want to ever hear it again.
[3]
Tom Ewing: Slightly taken aback by the quasi-mysticism of this twangy boyband record, since the woman they’re singing to seems to be some kind of cosmic incarnation of love itself. Aim high, lads! The mealy-mouthed earnestness of the performance suggests they’re serious: the atrociously tepid tune suggests these particular prayers will go unheard.
[2]
Martin Kavka: There’s far more wisdom about the give-and-take of relationships in R. Kelly’s “Number One Sex” than there is here. Unlike that song, this is clean on the surface. But its soul is filthy.
[2]
Pete Baran: Premise 1: She is love and she is all you need. Premise 2: This song is a sappy piece of sub David Gray (!) happy whining bullshit.
[0]
Michaelangelo Matos: Which soundtrack did this wonder come from? Which one(s) will it end up on?
[3]
Kat Stevens: If this song was being sung by Ryan Tedder or the dude from The Script, I’d hate it unreservedly. In fact I’m quite close to hating it anyway – the “LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE” chorus is kind of dire. But, like the ending of a soppy film where the female lead says her last goodbye to her dying husband yet Remains Strong for the sake of their unborn baby, somehow the young chap manages to melt my icy heart.
[4]
Chuck Eddy: If you pay extreme attention to his high notes, you can almost detect why the singer reportedly got to cover Hall and Oates’s “Say It Isn’t So” and “It’s a Laugh” (excellent choice, that one!) as part of some Daryl Hall-curated “internet concert” (whatever that is.) But if you listen less close, these young wusses might as well be just another emo or Brit-pop outfit as the Maroon 5 disciples people peg them as — and at this point, is the distinction even worth calibrating?
[4]
Dan MacRae: It’s like a greeting card threw up bubblewrapped Gavin DeGraw everywhere. Which at least is a marked improvement on regular Gavin DeGraw.
[2]
Hillary Brown: It’s like John Mayer without the redeeming sense of humor or the dirty little sense of guilt.
[2]
Ian Mathers: Look, I will happily confess to loving isolated songs by bands like Lifehouse, Pilot Speed, David Gray, etc etc. I’m not adverse to pop/rock per se, nor even to cheese. But beginning with the wince-inducingly mawkish title it’s clear that Parachute are scraping the absolute bottom of the post Maroon 5/Five for Fighting/Matchbox 20 barrel, and it’s not like that one was exactly full of good stuff to begin with.
[1]
Alfred Soto: He’s beat down, kicked around, and lost his faith in the darkest days – and there’s sixteen lines left.
[1]
Anthony Miccio: “She takes it all for me”? “They call her love”? I choose to believe this song is a valentine from a reluctant junkie pimp to his steadfast trick-turning girlfriend, as there will be nothing else to entertain me when this frat-folk jive becomes a supermarket perennial.
[3]
Anthony Easton: I really hope that some boy in Michigan gets a hand job after his junior prom after agreeing to slow dance to this, because there is no other reason for this emo bullshit to exist.
[2]
Guys:
Rites of Spring, Sunny Day Real Estate, Promise Ring, Get Up Kids, Jimmy Eat World, Cap’n Jazz, Taking Back Sunday, Brand New, Paramore, Fall Out Boy, Dashboard Confessional, Jawbreaker, Saves the Day, Braid, Texas is the Reason, Thursday, etc. etc.
Can we please either learn what emo is or not use the word?
And your point is that none of them do ballads this limp and pale, or what?
(News flash #2: Brit-pop bands are actually British!)
None of them do ballads this limp or pale, no, but my point is that if something isn’t emo, and has about as much in common with emo as it does with jazz or dub or country: don’t call it emo.
And my point, and Anthony Easton’s too I bet, is that what makes this music useless isn’t far from what’s seemed to make most emo useless in recent years — so much so, that the styles blur together. (I’ll admit, though, that that there’s no doubt plenty of emo I’m not hearing. So I might be wrong. I’d love to hear recommendations of current emo that doesn’t totally stink to the point of vanishing from one’s memory on contact — Or better yet, maybe you could convince Will to include some allegedly better current “real” emo tracks on the Jukebox, which would motivate the rest of us to consider them. Maybe then we’d hear the difference you’re hearing. Right now, seems to me the distinction is mostly that these guys have slightly better singing voices. And okay, less prominent guitars, I guess, but it’s not like emo guitars have done much worth writing home about lately, either.) (And btw, I’m distinguishing emo from good-cop/bad-cop wimpy-voice/barf-voice “screamo” which I think of as a distinct sub-genre, which is to say shitty in an entirely different way.)
I think “emo” is “any young earnest guy strumming a guitar who isn’t either yarling or pulling some jason mraz shooby-doo” shit for many people these days, though I’d argue this track goes closer to mraz than dashboard confessional. it’s all about that summer lilt.
The new Paramore album is actually good, guys.
There was really no reason to include it in the blurb, but I would like to note that these guys were originally named Sparky’s Flaw.
After working a multitude of the horribly ear-wrenching, mind-numbing poor excuses for shows that these little pubic hairs put on at the now defunct Starr Hill Music Hall in (Sparky’s Flaw/Parachute’s home town) Charlottesville, VA, I can only say that I love absolutely EVERYTHING about this entire blurb.
thank you.
[…] against Alf Landon in 1936 — he might as well have run unopposed. The rest of the sorry lot: Parachute, New Boyz ft. Ray J, Hockey, Leona Lewis, R. Kelly ft. Keri Hilson, Fuck Buttons, Trey Songs ft. […]