My story with Brand New is just one of many, but over the course of their crossing over to the mainstream, I’m sure there are lots just like it. My first years of paying attention to music and engaging with new releases was spent on a small music forum. We liked what we liked there, which was mostly Pitchfork favorites but with some crossing over into other scenes. Roughly fifty regular posters participated there, of which three or four were legitimate punks –forming their own bands with friends, seeing shitty basement shows, following the incestuous scene with verve and attention. Those couple of folks never got us to really embrace Set Your Goals or Owen or whatever, but Brand New was a point of common interest. Jesse Lacey’s merry band started out being influenced by Their bands (Sunny Day Real Estate, Lifetime, Glassjaw) and into Our bands (Modest Mouse, Built to Spill, Pixies). They were a great equalizer.
Which is, in the end, due to the music. There was something special in Brand New’s music that caught the ears of people in two different scenes – even people like me, who wouldn’t even find out those scenes existed until years later. Something that encouraged their fans to explode with enthusiasm and share it with everyone they could, until finally it’s 2017 and Brand New are getting their due from everyone. The music did all that.
So let’s talk about it, finally, huh?
The Come-Up:
Brand New were already perfect for what they were on their debut album. Your Favorite Weapon is an ecstatic, tightly-wound collection of pop-punk songs. The band never lets up on its barrage of drop-tuned power chords or harmonized vocals and Jesse Lacey never stops being a flamboyant little shit both lyrically or vocally. But in the two years between their debut and Deja Entendu, Brand New first pulled the trick that would define them for the rest of their career: uprooting their sound and settling for something different that nonetheless sounds fully-formed and confident. Any other band who went from Your Favorite Weapon to Deja Entendu would need an album in-between to ease into that sound, to try things and fail forward. Not Brand New.
The main difference in sound is tempo. Their songs barreled forward with reckless intensity on their first album, but Deja Entendu is resolutely midtempo. The first proper song, “Sic Transit Gloria… Glory Fades” enters with a thumping, rubbery bassline pushing the song forward, and it would be an entirely alien sound on Your Favorite Weapon. That’s not to say that the band’s tools are entirely different – you’ve still got the energetic chorus, complete with screams – but they’re being bent towards other ends. These slower songs mean that the band has to lay down deeper grooves, and the instrumentalists step up to the plate: guitarist Vincent Accardi and bassist Garrett Tierney’s loping performance is vital to the success of “Jaws Theme Swimming,” and Brian Lane handles the frequent verse/chorus tempo changes on songs like “The Quiet Things That No One Ever Knows” and “Guernica” with apblomb. And they sound great. Mike Sapone, who produced all the band’s albums, gives Deja Entendu a reverbed, dreamy atmosphere while letting all the instruments stay clear and noticeable in the mix. The album doesn’t hit very hard, but that floaty sound, like they’re holding back, is no small reason why Brand New mesmerizes so many people.
But – and he would probably hate to hear this – Jesse Lacey continues to play the role of rock-star frontman here. Fortunately, he’s shifted his lyrical concerns from adolescent put-downs, revenge against exes, and histrionic bitching into something more self-aware. “Watch me cut myself wide open on this stage,” he sings on “I Will Play My Game Beneath the Spin Light.” He’s well aware of the power he commands as a popular musician (“Oh, I would kill for the Atlantic / But I am paid to make girls panic while I sing”) and spends the album alternately pumping himself up over it and lamenting how toxic the position is. “Okay I Believe You But My Tommy Gun Don’t” is a pitch-black comedy of curdling masculinity, Lacey proclaiming “These are the words you wish you wrote down / This is the way you wish your voice sounds / Handsome and smart / Oh, my heart’s the only muscle on my body that works harder than my heart.” But on “Me vs. Maradona vs. Elvis,” that same power curdles and numbs him: “I will lie awake / And lie for fun, and fake the way I hold you / Let you fall for every empty word I say.” It’s the most dead and hopeless he’s ever sounded on record… to date, at least.
“Me vs. Maradona vs. Elvis” is key to Deja Entendu. On the one hand, it’s the most beautiful melody the band has ever written, a terrific showcase of Lacey’s meticulous vocals. On the other hand, it’s where the band runs out of steam and shows the limits of this sound. Over and over on Deja Entendu (“I Will Play My Game Beneath the Spin Light,” “Okay I Believe You But My Tommy Gun Don’t,” “The Boy Who Blocked His Own Shot,”) the band has gone from acoustic strumming to full-band rocking to enliven proceedings, and on “Me vs. Maradona vs. Elvis,” a song that really didn’t need it, they pull the same trick again. It sounds obligatory, as if they have no enthusiasm for it. It takes them four measures of dead-eyed power-chord strumming before they can even muster the last chorus. It’s as if they just realized, “hey, we’re pretty good at this sound, but it isn’t really where our heart is at.” And the three songs after it don’t offer much to change that view: “Guernica” is a lot of energy in service of no real lyrical soul, “Good to Know That If I Need Attention All I Have to Do Is Die” rides a fake-out ending as interminable as its title for far too long, and “Play Crack the Sky” can only offer an overdone metaphor (this relationship… is like a sinking ship!) At least when they closed out Your Favorite Weapon with an acoustic song, “Soco Amaretto Lime,” it was filled with bitter humor and irony.
By the end Deja Entendu shows the need for growth – which is quite a thing for a band that had already grown a massive amount in such a short time. Sure, I’m not hot on the end of the album, but those first seven-and-a-half songs are great. They showed that they could change with the times and deliver a worthy follow-up, that they weren’t going away any time soon. Not enough people were paying attention to them, but they should have been.
The Peak:
I said that it sounded like Your Favorite Weapon and Deja Entendu should have had an album of intermediate development in between them, so great were the sonic changes. Well, that’s pretty much what happened in between Deja Entendu and the subsequent album. Fans leaked eight demos that Brand New had been workshopping for their third album to the internet. These demos, eight untitled tracks under the bootleg name Fight Off Your Demons and eventually released to the public under the name Leaked Demos 2006, were mostly pretty good. They featured heartbreaking acoustic tunes, songs that wouldn’t have sounded out-of-place on Deja Entendu, and experimentation with new instruments.
But the release of those demos is mostly seen as a good thing, as the band scrapped most of them and opted to start over, with a new batch of songs that nevertheless benefitted from the trial-and-error manpower that they had already put into changing up their sound. So when The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me came out in 2006, Brand New had once again set their foot firmly into a new aesthetic. People responded – not as many people as should have been listening in the first place, but those who did heard something special.
Brand New, on their magnum opus, finally found a mode that they were supernaturally good at: discomfort. The quietLOUD dynamics were pushed to their extremes, desperate whispers giving way to piercing wails. Jesse Lacey ceded more lyrical control to Vincent Accardi, and together their words expressed a pitch-black existential despair. Mike Sapone outdid himself, sucking away the comfortable blanket of Deja Entendu in favor of letting the notes ring out and echo into what sounds like a gaping maw. Most importantly, the songs stopped being predictable: rather than uniformly starting midtempo and getting louder for the choruses, they squirmed, lunged, built up and collapsed.
It’s one of the best rock albums of the 2000s, one with an outsize (and arguably still-growing) reputation that far outstrips the modest success it had at the time. But it was one without an obvious follow-up, and though Brand New would keep being Brand New, when they finally returned, not everybody was happy with the results.
The Comedown:
Daisy sounds like an album from a younger band. Maybe that’s why people had a hard time wrapping their heads around it: Brand New chose to push one element of their sound to its extreme rather than play around with the shades of grey they had introduced on their last album. That kind of move is normally associated with artists who haven’t come into their own yet. The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me was self-consciously a masterpiece, an hour-long album with a variety of moods and a surprising wealth of approaches. Daisy, on the other hand, is Brand New’s shortest album at just over forty minutes. Compared to what came before, it’s lean, mean, and unforgiving.
The desire to push their sound to the extreme is clear from the opener “Vices,” which starts with a crackly recording of an opera singer before smashing through the walls with bludgeoning noise and Jesse Lacey’s hellish screams, so loud and mixed so far into the red that the recording clips with the effort of trying to contain it all. If anyone ever got the idea that Lacey was flaunting his good looks and poetic faculties to pose as a rock star, Daisy obliterates the notion. He’s not some brooding Byronesque hero here, but an avatar of despair – moreover, one completely willing to sit in the background. The climaxes of “You Stole” and “Bought A Bride” come not with the traditional Brand New shouted chorus but with white-hot guitar leads from Vincent Accardi.
The band’s love of quietLOUD dynamics persists here, but they’ve found new ways to be loud. Mike Sapone’s favorite trick here is to bury Lacey’s vocals behind distortion, while letting the band overtake him, most notably in “Daisy” and “Noro.” These songs blow out the drums and bass, leaving Lacey unmoored in an increasingly turbulent sea. The hypnotic “Bed” is the moment when the band learns the value of repetition, growing more intense with every chant of the harmonized “Laid her on the bed” chorus even though there’s no singular moment of explosion. It feels like they rejected the studio as a crutch in favor of working on their ability as a band. The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me was immaculately produced, but Daisy blasts the whole thing to the extreme so that the band have nothing to rely on but themselves. Everything on here is guitar, bass, and drums – no pianos, no overdubs, not even an acoustic guitar.
For all that Daisy gets rejected by Brand New fans, I think it was vital to their legacy. The influences here are clear, but they lean towards 90s noise rock – The Jesus Lizard, Fugazi, Jawbox, Slint. Those are names that mainstream publications have a lot easier time swallowing. Most of them had dismissed Brand New by 2003 (at the latest) and to hear them deliver an album that owed so much to that "respectable" strain of rock music made it clear that there was something more to Brand New. Which led them to work backwards and rediscover The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me. So Brand New diehards waited for a new album because they wanted to know if Daisy was a one-off and the band would return to their “real” sound. New fans waited because they wanted to see how they built on Daisy to create a new sound. And they all waited. And waited. And the band’s legend grew exponentially, until…
Well, I already had a big thing about this at the beginning of the review.
The Verdict:
I’m an unabashed Daisy apologist, sorry. I think it’s their second-best album behind The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me. I think it’s wild that they managed to make two albums that are so good for such different reasons. For the third time in a row, Brand New stepped into a new skin and inhabited it well. With the release of Science Fiction, it’s much easier to see how it fits into their evolution – as a mapping-out of how far they could push the abrasive discomfort of their sound. When they returned, eight years later, to something more expansive and Devil and God-ish, they sounded more confident than ever in who they were. Daisy is responsible for that.
But more importantly, it’s just a great noise-rock album. The highlights are doled out liberally, unlike the supremely frontloaded Deja Entendu, and the band turns in fantastic performances. I’m calling it, this week, for the comedown album.
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