Review: Brand New – Daisy (2009)
The sighing calls after “we need vices!” stoke the adrenaline-fueled pyre of a song that is “Vices;” it leads the album off after some unnamed petticoat warbles out a stately piano-led tune, and it is perversely pleasurable to hear her prim performance torn asunder. The two most heated cuts on Brand New’s latest, “Vices” and “Sink,” positively fume with vehemence, and are likely among the most explosive in the band’s career; they top even the most furious peaks of The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me.
Although they have long since shaken off of the thin emo-etry that Your Favorite Weapon employed on “The Shower Scene” and “Last Chance To Lose Your Keys,” Daisy‘s slower tracks are mostly devoid of quality riffage, and compared against their last two albums, constitute lateral songwriting changes that are ultimately, and sadly, unmemorable (“Bed,” “You Stole,” “Noro”). Consider, for a moment, the ukulele wonder “Deep Water” on Portishead’s Third: the track is so transparently mismatched — and what’s more, short — that its obvious incongruence comes as a colorful patch on a loved blanket. Daisy has so many disparate moments, positive and negative, that the whole thing can seem a cobbled mess; in particular, there’s no fully exhumed old-timey gospel theme outside of the title track (merely the sampled bookends on “Vices” & “Noro,” and a momentary interlude on “In A Jar”).
Much of the meat of the album, in fact, takes place without the presence of convincing hooks – Daisy ends up spending so much time prepping its more effective outbursts with meted filler that by the time the music delivers, the gut reaction is often relief, not enjoyment. “At The Bottom,” for example, has such a tiresome guitar line that you can almost hear Jack Black intoning, “every once in awhile, bend it.” Futher on, “You Stole” proves a laughably ironic title for a song that sounds like Interpol’s “Obstacle 1″ on Ativan; it is an exceptionally uninteresting song that at no point justifies its six-minute length. After it ends, though, the album is quickly (and thankfully) rescued from a downward turn with “Be Gone” and “Sink,” the former being an excellent psyched-out blues stomp-and-wail a la The Black Keys.
Brand New’s “Sink,” from Daisy.
The one indisputable quality Brand New appears to have mastered is mood. The arrangements creep and rattle, then bend and crash, oozing zeal when they do find the right notes. The lyrical approach, however, bears a few hangups. On paper, it’s no better or worse than any other given style, but on record, it doesn’t translate quite so cleanly. To elaborate, the lyrics, overall, are specific enough to outline discrete events and emotions — thereby limiting the universal relatability of the themes, and curtailing the listener’s ability to glean their own personal meanings (unlike, say, The Eagles’ “Desperado”) — but not fleshed out to sufficiently create an author’s narrative that can be traced and connected with cathartically. In short, “laid her on the bed / lie to all your friends” doesn’t give us much to chew on. It makes the plot segmented and frustrating; only when it’s at its moments of bare, wicked intensity (like on “Gasoline,” below) is Daisy able to counter-balance some of the arduous hieroglyphics: “when the army had to hold the line / well, you were nowhere near the front / before the kids could tell the dog goodbye / well, you were loading up your gun.”
Comparing most anything here with Deja Entendu‘s “Sic Transit Gloria…Glory Fades,” on the other hand, gives a great view into the band’s evident maturation in songwriting. You hear a lot of “he” and “she,” and blow-by-blow, the song unfolds into a teenage sexual lament (that’s “hips,” by the way, not “lips”). It was fitting at its moment in the band’s timeline, but the pitch-corrected background howl wouldn’t fly the same way six years later. By contrast, the content on Daisy is a more assured and thoughtful, and hits more savagely than in the past (“I swear, it’s like dying / to catch a ghost / it feels like I’m trying / to hold smoke,”) and sounds loads more appropriate for a fanbase that is moving into its 20s and 30s. What lead singer Jesse Lacey doesn’t seem to realize, however, is that the audience typically appreciates the anthems for their potency, not their depth. Trying to ennoble the requisite emo/punk relationship drama is one thing, but resting otherwise banal arrangements on vague proclamations is nearly always going to result in unsatisfying music (“Daisy”).
Do we need to plumb these cavernous depths? Maybe. If you put up with pop-punk well and are just looking for something upbeat, the answer is probably no; the investment here is far too steep for the promised return. If this kind of music riles you up, there are other, better avenues from decades past that are beckoning to be ambled down, but you don’t want that, do you? You need a skinny-jeans version of it, and to be fair, the latent nihilism that characterizes so many early punk albums is replaced here with vulnerability, and that, at least, is valuable. Very well; Brand New is still worth investigating, and the album may not be their magnum opus, but it is good. They haven’t quite arrived, however Brand New’s greatest strength at present is their clear intent to push forward and hone their sound. Brand New isn’t entirely to be written off, but Daisy doesn’t show the brilliance of a band in full command of any of the several muses present.
