The very first Brand New song I heard was probably Sowing Season or Jesus Christ. Sowing Season probably just in passing because it was one of their more popular songs. Jesus Christ was the first one I downloaded, at the recommendation of one Nathan Smith. It is a wonderful song, though wonderful is probably a strange word to describe it. I'm not very good at interpreting song lyrics and Jesse Lacey is a fantastic song writer but the song seems more or less like a simile between what the singer is going through and the crucifixion of Jesus. There might be more or fewer religious overtones than I see but I mainly see the religious part as a metaphor for what he's going through.
So anyway, that was my first exposure to the band, towards the end of my senior year of high school. Three years after The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me was released and three months before their newest album, Daisy, was released. Most of my favorite bands have come from me getting in to their music long after its been released. I'm like the anti-hipster in that sense. "I discovered this after anyone was still listening to it". So, yeah, I can't say I wss their first big fan or anything.
I had Jesus Christ for about a month before I downloaded Deja Entendu. I don't know why I waited so long. Probably just dealing with all the shit that goes on in the last month of senior year. (Note that I looked up the dates I added these songs in my iTunes library and that I don't have a freakish memory for this.) Anyway, possibly as a result, Deja Entendu is probably my favorite album of theirs.
I wish I could explain why. I guess because it's still a degree of pissed off but not as high-school-feeling as Your Favorite Weapon, their first album, but also not as heavy and dark as The Devil and God... or Daisy. One of my favorite Brand New songs is "Okay I Believe You, but My Tommy Gun Don't". First because what an awesome title. Second, it's a ridiculously fun and funny song. Jesse Lacey is pretty clearly poking fun at everyone in music who're so full of themselves. My favorite line is probably "My tongue's the only muscle in my body that works harder than my heart" just because of how ridiculously over the top it is with how sincere and great of a writer/singer he is.
Deja Entendu is just great to listen to all the way through. This is where my lack of ability to talk about why I like music comes in but pretty much every element of it is great in my eyes. I guess I'm a sucker for overdubbing and harmonies (I guess you can call them that). The type of screaming, again I'm not sure if you can call it that, on this album is the kind that I actually like. Lacey has a ton of vocal range. If I had to pick a few songs for you to listen to from the album besides the one I already names, I'd go with "The Quiet Things That No One Ever Knows", "Sic Transit Gloria... Glory Fades" and "Good to Know That if I Ever Need Attention All I Have to Do is Die". Hooray long titles.
So after a month of Deja Entendu, I bought The Devil and God... It's a very different album than Deja Entendu, much darker, much heavier. I am, again, terrible at interpreting meaning but pretty much all the songs are about shitty things happening and how they are dealt with. I am oversimplifying a lot. One of the things I like most about this album is how jarring some of the songs are. I'd explain it but here's an example of what I'm talking about.
It's amazing how the song goes from a relatively soft song to Lacey just screaming his lungs out. Whenever I listen to this song now, I'm waiting for that moment in the song because it's the best part. It's a dark song but there are times where you want someone out of your life that badly. But just the juxtaposition of that relative calm with the rawness that comes out of it is something I'm a sucker for. That kind of thing is a trademark of this album. I love a song that can scare the shit out of me like that.
This album is ridiculously good beyond that one song. It's obviously depressing, given the title. The character singing (I guess that's how I've always seen it) is going through varying stages of shit, from depressing to pining for lost opportunities to uncertainty to just straight wanting to kill someone. And the emotions that come out of it lead to it just being so powerful.
Next in my Brand New quest came their brand new album, Daisy. Daisy is their... weirdest album. They infuse a bunch of old radio clips which is actually kind of cool. It leads to another holy shit moment though in Vices. Possibly worse than the one in Luca. Daisy is just about as pissed off as The Devil and God... though not as focused on just an ex, as far as I can tell. Daisy hasn't lasted as well as my first two Brand New experiences. About half of the songs I don't really want to hear when they come on now. I don't know if it's because of overplaying them or just not as high of quality or what. You Stole, Bed and At the Bottom are the main examples. You Stole is pretty much six minutes of those two words being repeated.
My favorite songs from this album are Bought a Bride, Sink and In a Jar. I think it's just the shifts from relative calm to screaming that makes me like them. This album is so much more dark and doesn't have the clever lyrics I look for and have relished in their last albums. But the musicianship is really good as always and it's a nice departure from what they've done in the past. A lot different.
So for some reason I waited another six months before buying Brand New's first album Your Favorite Weapon. And going back to this album after hearing their others, it's amazing how much they've evolved since then. YFW was a really good album but it was still just a pop-punk album. When I only hear the intro to, say, Jude Law and a Summer Abroad, I think it's a blink-182 song. This isn't bad but any means but if you played me Failure by Design and then played me At the Bottom back to back I would have no idea they were by the same band.
The more I listen to this album, the more I like it. It's really fun, even though they're still angry emo kids at this point. One of the songs, Seventy Time 7, is basically calling out the lead singer of Taking Back Sunday and saying they hope he dies on his way home from a party, though not as literally as it sounds. In what's probably my favorite song on the album, Mixtape, the band even self-references, which I always like in a song for some reason:
I just love how the song is lyrically even if it's pretty immature. He's clearly telling a girl to get out of his life and calling her fake but it's not as depressingly heavy as the last two albums and comes off as playful. I wouldn't say that musically YFW is up to the standard of the last three albums but that's to be expected and it's not like it's bad. It's just more generic.
I guess the biggest thing I like about Brand New is that all four of their albums sounds different. With many of the bands that started around the same time as them, their sound hasn't changed very much since then. But each of Brand New's four albums are distinct. If you play a song I can identify which album it's from immediately, which I might not be able to do with a band like the Foo Fighters or something. YFW is like someone dealing with their first break up, Deja Entendu is the growth past that. The Devil and God are dealing with a bad end to a serious relationship and Daisy is the aftermath of that and growing cynicism.
So that's Brand New. A very amateurish review of their career thus far. If you haven't heard much of them, I hope this leads you to check them out. You can see whether I'm way off with my ideas about what their songs and albums are about or even about how good they are. But that's what music is, ultimately. Subjective.
