After hearing so many emo boys sing so torturously about girls for the past half decade in bands such as Fall Out Boy and Panic at the Disco, it's nice to finally have a female voice doing some of the wailing.
That was the welcome juxtaposition offered Friday night at Roy Wilkins Auditorium by Paramore, whose lead singer Hayley Williams, 20, is one of the brightest young women in rock. And that's no comment on her hair, which -- gasp! -- she recently bleached blonde from its former fire-red.
Thanks in large part to Williams' vein-popping voice, the Nashville-area band has been nominated for a best new artist Grammy and earned the prime slot on last year's "Twilight" soundtrack. It also has quite a track record in St. Paul, where it played the State Fair last summer and opened for No Doubt in July next door at Xcel Energy Center.
Friday's 75-minute set -- a makeup date for when Williams lost her voice last month -- suggested the quintet is ready to headline arenas on its own, even if only around 3,000 fans attended. Touring behind its No. 2-charting third disc, "Brand New Eyes," the group is at least nipping at the Vans-encased heels of its all-male emo peers artistically.
In the end, the nicest contrast in Friday's concert wasn't its femininity, but its quality. Simply put, Williams out-rocked the boys in her league.
She ran, pogoed, writhed and twisted her way around the stage, matching the roller-coaster emotions in the show-opener "Ignorance" and the encore highlight "Misery Business." Her voice sturdily recalled a pre-Zen Alanis Morissette ("That's What You Get") and a "Barracuda"-biting Ann Wilson ("Crushcrushcrush").
Paramore is hardly just Williams' band, too. Anchored by brothers Josh and Zac Farro on guitar and drums, respectively, the rest of the group flexed like a tight muscle in the punky "Here We Go Again," while dramatic tunes such as "Turn It Off" and the stormy "Careful" showed range.
But it is Williams who sets the band apart. When she snarled out the line, "The world doesn't need another band," in "Looking Up," it sounded truly ironic. The teen rock realm could at least use more female-fronted groups like this.