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.