this is not pitchfork

This is the album that will finally send the original Brand New fans packing.  Their debut album, Your Favorite Weapon, was pure pop punk candy. They matured with Deja Entendu and furthered their maturity on The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me. Fans who loved the band for songs like Jude Law and a Semester Abroad found none of those ironic, pop-culture induced lyrics there. Instead they were greeted with songs that were complex and dark, both lyrically and musically.  The band lost some fans but gained listeners who embraced the new style.

Daisy is an extension of Devil and God. Even though most of the songs on Daisy were written by Vincent Accardi (where Jesse Lacey wrote the bulk of Brand New songs previously), the themes that ran through Devil and God are present here, as well as the musical experimentation.

Daisy runs the gamut. There’s noise rock and screamo, there’s melodic stories and steering wheel-banging rhytms, there’s a church hymn and a country twang. It all says one thing: this is a band that is more about making music than making hits. There’s no real radio hit here, nothing for the Favorite Weapon fans to grab onto. There’s just rich music and jarring lyrics and a complete wildness that makes the whole album feel unsettled, in a good way. It leaves you wanting more, but instead of reaching for something else, you go back to the beginning and listen again. It’s an addictive album.

The progression of Brand New has been like watching a kid grow up;  Your Favorite Weapon was a mere child having fun in a playground, Deja Entendu was a teenager’s angst filled notebook, Devil and God was a young adult yearning to know more about everything and here we have Daisy - grown up, a little wiser but still on the verge of emotional breakdown. But aren’t we all? Daisy picks up so well where Devil and God left off that it’s not a follow up album as much as it is a segue.

If anything, Daisy is the band’s breakup with itself. They’ve severed ties with the boys who wrote Your Favorite Weapon and they’ve embraced what they’ve become after.  Fans may have been lost in the process, but that’s the price any band pays when they grow up.

You can’t listen to it in front of your parents and you can’t listen to it in front of your kids, so you just have to find a bunch of like-minded immature people who laugh at jokes about those less fortunate than you, who see farting contests as high culture or listen to Skid Row when nobody’s watching. Yea, I’m talking about you. Come on, you felt a slight sense of camaraderie with the BHG while downing your vodka Slurpie and singing:

Eat Spam from the can watch late night C-Span
And rock out to old school Duran Duran.

That was just me?

Doesn’t matter. All I know is that when I was at some real low point in my life and I was slouched in a chair sipping on my vodka Slurpee (seriously, you have never done that?) wondering, does any of this matter? Fire Water Burn came on and the completely lackadaisical way in which he sings “the roof, the roof, the roof is on fire” summarized my entire existence right then and there, and if drunkenly singing the lyrics “I dont know mofo if yall peeps be buggin give props to my ho cause she all fly” doesn’t make you laugh at yourself, nothing will.

This album is offensive to almost everyone, juvenile in its humor and devoid of any thoughts deeper than your average fart joke, but it makes me smile and sometimes that’s all that matters, especially when vodka Slurpees are no longer an option.

I was never really into hair metal. I left that up to my youngest sister, who embraced the entire culture of hair metal with ever fiber of her being. She rocked the hair metal harder than you, and had the Jersey Hair to prove it.

Yet somehow, I ended up with a slew of albums from this genre. Who knows. Maybe I was drunk when I bought them. Maybe I was forced to buy them at gunpoint. Or maybe I stole them from my sister in an effort to keep her from playing this crap in the house.

Or maybe, just maybe, there was this tiny little part of me, a part buried way down deep in my soul that likes this crap. Maybe there have been one or two times, or maybe a dozen, when I’ve sung Talk Dirty to Me into a hairbrush-as-microphone, actually enjoying lyrics like “behind the bushes, til I’m screaming for more.” I said maybe. This may or may not have happened.

I don’t think I ever really listened to the rest of the album. But I looked at it. I stared at that album cover for hours at a time, imagining that we were all the victims of some elaborate hoax and these four guys were really girls. Because they looked remarkably like my sisters and her friends. This came into play again many years later, when I had the revelation that Bret Michaels was really Ann Coulter. Wait, maybe that’s Sebastian Bach. Ok, hold on…am I reviewing the right album? Did Poison do Talk Dirty to Me or was that Skid Row?

Whatever. What it all boils down to is I still love Talk Dirty to Me. Maybe it’s just nostalgia that makes me love it, but it doesn’t matter. I’ve got a hairbrush and a sudden desire to wake up the whole house at 6am yelling “CC, pick up that guitar and talk to me!”

It’s 1983. I’m sitting in the basement of my boyfriend’s house in the middle of winter. There’s a huge storm going on outside and we’ve got blankets and pillows and High Land, Hard Rain on the stereo as we watch the snow swirl around under the streetlights.

I wanted to memorize the moment because it was just so perfect. And, at the wise old age of 20, I thought the perfection would remain, that every night would be like that, that I’d found everlasting happiness. There was so much comfort and warmth in those blankets and Roddy Frame’s voice was the perfect backdrop to all of it.

It’s so easy to think things are wonderful when you have no idea what’s coming next. When there’s calming melodies and soothing rhythms enveloping you and the mood is set in a way that lets you forget how much angst and anxiety is buried in your soul, it’s so easy to call it perfection.

Listening to this album now, I think if i knew then what I know now, if I knew that so many years later This Boy Wonders would bring a rueful smile to my face – I’d still enjoy the heck out of the album, even the moment, however fleeting.

I love that I can still enjoy Walk Out to Winter without feeling any kind of remorse or regret over the memories it brings up. Unlike other albums that remind me of less stellar times in my life, there’s such a quaint sweetness to this that makes me remember the warmth and forgive the cold that came after.

High Land, Hard Rain is full of words that sound like movie dialogue spoken every so quietly by some wispy haired boy brandishing a broken heart, a thousand secrets and a gun. Yet those words somehow make you smile wistfully, as if we’re all privy to some intimate memory he’s about to shoot down.

I listened to this album a lot when I was going through a “woe is me” phase. It wasn’t the lyrics that attracted me to the songs at first; it was Jonah Matranga’s voice. His vocals embodied exactly what I was feeling. He sounded tired and worn out. While that might not sound like a compliment, it worked for Jonah and for this album. His voice has such a rawness, such jagged edges that it comes off as imperfect and sometimes imperfection is just what you’re looking for.

I thought this would be one of those records I use up and put away after I’m done wringing my emotions out of it, but Water and Solutions stayed with me. When I dusted the self absorption of the “fuck my life” attitude off of me, I really, really listened to the songs. There’s a lot more here than I gave it credit for. There’s a positivity amongst all that woe, a few laughs between the tears, reconciliation after the anger. There are clever lyrics and a subtlety to the music that allows it to sort of sneak into your soul and before you know it, you are wrapped up in everything about it. Listening to Water and Solutions is like being wrapped in a warm blanket.

I came for the whining. I stayed for the warm fuzzies.

Listen: Waiting For Sunday

I heard the song Bandages coming from my daughter’s room one day in late 2002 and I said “What is this? I must have it.” And I stole the CD from her. Don’t think I ever gave it back.

It’s very rare that I will instantly fall in love with an entire album, especially one from a band I never heard before. It usually takes many listens to accomplish that feeling of love. Does it work in the house, in the car, at work? Is it an album I’d play anywhere? Does it make me want to start it again as soon as it’s over? This one passed all the tests. It works everywhere. It’s driving music and working music, and it’s dancing music and thinking music. Make Up the Breakdown is what the Cure would sound like if Robert Smith took Prozac. It’s all 80’s post punk/new wave without the introspection of that genre.

This album is a restart button for my head. If I’m having a crappy day, I put this on and it feels like a fresh start. You can’t help but feel joy when you listen to this. In fact, this is what I was listening to one day when my coworker called me a “ray of fucking sunshine.” I had to think a bit about whether she really meant it or not, but it didn’t matter, because Oh, Goddamnit was on and it certainly was making me feel like a ray of fucking sunshine.

I’m trying to not include greatest hits collections in these reviews, but I don’t have any original Five Satins albums and I felt they deserved to be here somewhere.

This is the music I grew up listening to. While my parents were very into modern rock and roll, it was the music of the 50s, especially doo-wop, that was the constant soundtrack to our lives. I loved that sound and I still do; I don’t know if it’s the melodies and the music itself that warms my heart, or the memories attached to all of it.

Occasionally, when I need some comfort or a smile or just a reminder of less complicated times, I listen to In the Still of the Night. I close my eyes and I am in my parents backyard, about eight years old, wearing a yellow tank top and tan cotton shorts. It’s early evening and my parents have company over. They are scattered around the yard, sipping exotic drinks with fancy stirrers and smoking long cigarettes. I can smell the sweetness of the drinks, the smoke from someone’s cigar, the chlorine in the pool. There are fireflies flitting around the yard, and I’m running after them with another girl, the daughter of one of my parent’s guests. She smells of coconut suntan lotion and the beach. The radio, a little am/fm portable with a bent antenna is tuned to a 50’s “oldies but goodies” program. The DJ – he has a booming voice that seems to echo around the yard – announces the next song. “And now, here’s The Five Satins with In The Still of The Night.”

shoo do- shooby doo shoo do- shooby doo

The girl and I stop chasing fireflies. We stare at the grownups. They are all singing along, the women and the men with their funny drinks and half-drunk voices and some men are singing louder than the others and some of the women are giggling.

In the still, still of the night I held you, held you tight

They are swaying and crooning and it’s almost embarrassing, yet something about it is giving me goosebumps. My mom and dad are holding each other and dancing, and a lot of the other couples have started dancing and the men are all singing to their wives. They sing off key, their voices full of beer. But it’s oddly sweet and I stare at them for a minute before the girl I am playing with pokes me in the side and starts giggling.

The intensity of that memory, the very innocence of it, the way it makes me feel for a moment that I’m eight years old is a wonderful thing. But it’s the music as well that fills me with a sense of nostalgia, the sound and feel of all these songs. It’s sweet and soothing and so beautifully arranged. Do they even make music like this anymore? Something so simple and beautiful? No, it’s not just the memories here. This is just quality music.

Someone requested I review this album. I had heard of it, but never heard it, so I figured what the hell, I could always use some new music. I listened to the title track and the Two-Headed Boy and on the basis of those songs, bought the album.

Back when I was a no-good teenager and used to do things like ingest chemicals that would alter my brain waves, I would spend some of that time just sitting in front of the mirror, with a candle between my reflection and myself. I’d put on some music – mostly Pink Floyd – and then watch the way the flickering of the flame changed my reflection. Someone – I think it was a long ago babysitter – told me that what you see in the mirror when you do this are all the people you were in past lives. So I’d stare and stare and be mesmerized by the appearance of my face melting and my eyes glowing and I’d wonder if maybe I was a skeleton in all my past lives.

Sometimes this experience was exhilarating, sometimes it was downright creepy and sometimes it was otherworldly. But always, it was fascinating.

And that’s exactly how I feel about In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. I don’t know if the music is the drugs, the candle or my reflection or a combination of all three, but this entire album makes me feel like I’m 16 years old and just ate an entire blotter sheet of acid and nothing is what it appears to be.

That’s a good thing.

[Some people see these as separate albums, some as one double album. Call it what you'd like. I'd prefer to just get these reviews over with in one shot. Also, I understand that my negative opinion of these albums is a minority opinion. Last time I wrote about these albums - and Axl - on an old blog, I got death threats. They were amusing and frightening at the same time]

My history with Axl and company is a long and complicated one. I imagine that most metal fans who hooked on to the early GnR bandwagon followed the same path I did. Think of the seven stages of grief in reverse. From acceptance (Appetite for Destruction = welcome to my record collection) to denial (I swear to you I never owned The Spaghetti Incident), we watched – and in some ways participated in – the slow death of a once great band. But it wasn’t their years of putting out head banging, fist pumping music that was the greatest show. No, it was watching Axl Rose trying in vain to raise the phoenix from the ashes that offered the most jaw dropping, car-wreck kind of entertainment this side of the November Rain video. But that’s another story and another review called Chinese Democracy.

I was looking forward to these albums. It had been about three years since Lies (which did not float my boat the way Appetite did). I think of each new album we wait for from a band we love is like the promise of hot, dirty sex after your partner has been away for a while. Well, my lust for the band kind of faded upon the release of these discs. It was then I realized that GnR was the equivalent of the girl who teases you with her perky breasts for years and when you finally manage to get under the hood, you grab hold of three inches of padded bra. All that music before Use Your Illusion was just a ruse to get us to this point. They gave us the good stuff first so they could later on sit back and make this pretentious, melodramatic drivel that they called art. There was nothing left to them. Empty D cups.

From the Harlequin romance of November Rain to trying-too-hard Civil War, the Illusion albums left me feeling frustrated and unfulfilled, which is not an easy thing to do when there are 30 songs to choose from. Bottom line is, my relationship with GnR boils down to a fabulous one night stand with Appetite, and a lot of too-drunk-to-fuck booty calls after that.

May, 1978. I was sitting outside the Mini Cinema in Uniondale, NY, probably waiting for the afternoon showing of Rocky Horror. We had a little portable radio with us, tuned to the local rock station (I’m guessing WNEW) and they were about to play the new Rolling Stones song. I was never a huge Stones fan, but I liked them enough that I was semi excited about some new Stones music. Their previous album, Black and Blue, pretty much sucked, so there was a lot of anticipation in regards to this one.

They played the first track. Miss You. I had the same reaction as when I first heard Kiss’s I Was Made for Loving You and The Grateful Dead’s Shakedown Street: “Oh my god. This sounds like disco.” The word disco was said with disdain and disgust, like you were spitting it out of your mouth. I was so horrified at this garbage coming out of my radio that I turned the station and vowed to not buy the album when it came out.

In June of 1978 I found my father singing along to Far Away Eyes and that was it. I cut myself off from the Stones.

As happens often in these reviews, I found myself many years later enjoying something I professed to hate at one point in my life. Like spinach and naps, the things I hated when I was younger became things I loved later on. And so it goes with Some Girls. I’ve learned to enjoy not only the Stones again, but some of the songs on Some Girls that made me cringe all those years ago. Shattered, Some Girls, Far Away Eyes, When the Whip Comes Down, I can listen to every single one of them without the bad taste of 1978 ruining it for me. And the song I hated upon first hearing, with it’s disco beat and hooky beat and it’s Puerto Rican girls just dyyyyying to meet you, has recently become one of my favorite tunes to sing in the car. By myself. Windows down.