When I first heard about Nashville’s Paramore, I wrote them off as just another pop punk band, albeit the rare one with a female singer. So I assumed they’d be more Bif Naked than New Found Glory. Big deal. Then I heard “Misery Business,” which was one of my favorite songs of 2007. That song nailed what Paramore did better than anyone else - complex guitars and drums, and killer vocals. Hayley Williams is truly a talented singer with a great future.

It’s just a shame that their new album, Brand New Eyes, lets her down so much.

By all accounts, Brand New Eyes was a tough album to record, due to tensions during the writing process. But rather than take that tension in a more oblique sort of direction, they approached it head-on in the lyrics. So now they’re yet another band to write songs about writing songs and another band commenting musically on being a band. That leads to the truly cringe-inducing “Looking Up”, with the refrain of “I can’t believe we almost hung it up/We’re just getting started.” Ooookay. There’s at least two songs that seem explicitly written to become crowd sing-alongs (“Where the Lines Overlap”, “Brick by Boring Brick”) and a simplistic one-line chorus for those that can’t be bothered to remember more than five words (“The Only Exception”). Arguably, the most interesting song on the record is the acoustic ballad “Misguided Ghosts”, with its idiosyncratic time signature and more engaging lyrics.

I had hoped that producer Rob Cavallo might be able to pull a better product out of the band. In 2003, Cavallo worked with Green Day on a record called Cigarettes and Valentines, but the master tracks were stolen, they started from scratch, and out emerged American Idiot. Cavallo also worked with Dave Matthews Band on this year’s Big Whiskey and the GrooGrux King, which made that band sound better than they have in years despite the death of founding member Leroi Moore. And Cavallo gives Paramore a shine and a luster they were missing on 2007’s Riot! The guitars are crunchier, the mix is more muscular, and the drums are much more aggressive. The band went into the recording process wanting to match their live sound, and Cavallo came through on that front with flying colors.

I find myself coming back to the album a lot, because despite its failures, it still sounds like a great rock record. But it also sounds like Paramore is holding back, not wanting to stray too far from the formula for lack of disappointing their fans. At least half the tracks sound exactly like songs on the last record; the other half sound like songs off 2005’s All We Know Is Falling. They did have sales numbers to match (Riot! sold platinum, after all), but I was hoping the band would be more adventurous with this record. But it seems maybe the friction in the band kept them in a holding pattern.

Joshua Hamer is the guitarist and multi-instrumentalist for Vote For Pedro. You can follow him on Twitter at @schwastl.