Album Review
Brand New
Daniel Brooks
Issue date: 12/4/06 Section: Entertainment
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In just the first three days of 2006, The Strokes released their third album, "First Impression of Earth" and therefore set the pace for the following twelve months. In February, the Arctic Monkeys actually lived up to the England-born hype, calling their album _ha ha ha _ "Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not". For April, Gnarls Barkley released their debut album, and everyone from here to China realized that "Crazy" might just be the first song in years to actually deserve it's excessive radio play. Not even a month later, the Red Hot Chili Peppers released "Stadium Arcadium", defying all by not only reaching number one, but doing it with a double album (something that hadn't really been done since the Smashing Pumpkins gave up Infinite Sadness), as a band that most everyone had given up on. Raised from the dead were Pearl Jam, Neil Young, Bob Dylan, and The Who. New albums by the Deftones, T.I., Jessica Simpson, AFI, The Game, and Clay Aiken; while each has virtually nothing to do with the other, they all were well received (by their fans, respectively). All in all, 2006 was a pretty good year for musicians, music fans, and record companies.
Here we are now, nearing the end of this revolution, and a New Jersey band called Brand New shows up with their first album in three years, "The Devil and God are Raging Inside Me".
Who? You've heard of them, I promise. If you had the internet in 2003, you probably read their lyrics when every teenage boy and girl quoted their second album "Deja Entendu" upside down. They were poster boys, more or less, for the new alternative Emo movement (before it turned to the pseudo-suicide state in which it exists today). They represented an almost desperate focus on poetics and texture while still being commercially appealing. But despite how well the second album was received, the band went underground.
Now, Brand New is back, but they do not sound anything like their name suggest. No, this album is riddled with disappointment and regret, frustration and tedious contemplation of things that time doesn't heal, and only time can cause. Even the album cover and inlay is, in a word, *haunted* by something too hard for even lead singer and lyric writer Jesse Lacey to articulate. There are pulpy photos _ as if they've only chosen the
Here we are now, nearing the end of this revolution, and a New Jersey band called Brand New shows up with their first album in three years, "The Devil and God are Raging Inside Me".
Who? You've heard of them, I promise. If you had the internet in 2003, you probably read their lyrics when every teenage boy and girl quoted their second album "Deja Entendu" upside down. They were poster boys, more or less, for the new alternative Emo movement (before it turned to the pseudo-suicide state in which it exists today). They represented an almost desperate focus on poetics and texture while still being commercially appealing. But despite how well the second album was received, the band went underground.
Now, Brand New is back, but they do not sound anything like their name suggest. No, this album is riddled with disappointment and regret, frustration and tedious contemplation of things that time doesn't heal, and only time can cause. Even the album cover and inlay is, in a word, *haunted* by something too hard for even lead singer and lyric writer Jesse Lacey to articulate. There are pulpy photos _ as if they've only chosen the
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