It is like that, after all. Paramore has reinvented itself with subtler principles. Their quality, eponymous album track, This Is Why, was the pop-punk-styled return that was expected of the group, while The News was a flustered but solid piece from Hayley Williams and company. C’est Comme Ca is completely different, a new challenge for the trio. Don’t be fooled by the French title, it’s an early-2000s indie rock tribute, not some sultry piece from the Chanson genre. It is infused with the opening guitar riffs that would have felt comfortable on a Franz Ferdinand or The Strokes number. Experimental. Sort of. C’est Comme Ca has France at the core of its chorus but little to do with it elsewhere.
There is a promising level to C’est Comme Ca, purely through the mixing, but it fails to impress. The constant, quick repetition of “na, na, na, na, na” from Hayley Williams provides patchy moments that make up the bulk of this under-three-minute track. Fundamentally basic, even with some nice details and wordplay found in the verses that precede and follow that clunky, title repetition. Unconvincing C’est Comme Ca may be, there are little bits and pieces throughout it that do point to the new era Paramore finds themselves entering. It is far more regressive than This Is Why, a great title track that is slowly starting to look like the only great single from the band ahead of their latest album.
Fun, at least. Vaguely. It has the hangover-like effect of being a piece that takes away that talented vocal play Williams can often engage with. Repeating the title of the track gets Paramore nowhere close to what they hoped to deal out on The News. Those spoken-word bits and pieces feel like a knock-off of what Yard Act had managed, but without the social commentary or culture disgust so keenly noted throughout that. Still, it is different to what Paramore has done, in the sense that it does not really fit with the skilled vocal play found on This Is Why and what was clamoured for on The News. Even as a piece to stand on its own, it is short enough to not be insultingly poor, but is not exceptional enough to be hailed as a new wave of Paramore sound. This has been done before, it has remnants of what Elastica would sound like if the pitch went haywire.
That “sudden degree of disorder” would appear to be a fine if forgettable track. Well-paced at least, and there is good tempo and range to the piece. A nice instrumental that pools into the “regression”-led lyrics are at least interesting. More of that next time. It is hard to divorce excitement for the new with the realisation that Paramore is just diving into the generic rock prose of the early 2000s, but at least it is done without indifference. C’est Comme Ca may be short and sweet, but it offers little in the way of progression for Paramore, which This Is Why is seemingly all about. One step forward, two steps back. A strange and harmless track, that, when considering the charged message found in The News and the feeling associated with the project so far, is a very odd change of pace.
