Understanding my love for
The Devil and God are Raging Inside Me (the album name was based on the troubled singer-songwriter Daniel Johnston and the well-known psychological problems he faced/s) might be a little clearer when studied in the larger Brand New context. It’s also going to be a bit of a journey so hang with me. When I was in college, emo was all the rage. Now, one of the most criminal misnomers in all of music was labeling things emo that didn’t truly represent emo. There was, I assure you, some genuine emo music out there that sounds nothing like the bands that get labeled emo today. So, Brand New was pretty emo. Their first record,
Your Favorite Weapon, contained all of the usual elements – pithy song titles (“Jude Law and a Semester Abroad”), “woe is me” pity songs, and “girls are evil” revenge songs – that you would come to expect from a run-of-the-mill emo band. However, there was something different buried beneath Brand New’s banal sound: the lyrics. Frontman Jesse Lacey and guitar player Vin Acardi (the latter who had a much reduced role until
The Devil and God…but more on that later) weren’t content with being run-of-the-mill, so they peppered their songs with some honest lyrics that made the ho-hum sound of the songs stand out because you wanted to belt out these odd words.
After
Your Favorite Weapon put Brand New on the map, they began work on their second album,
Deja Entendu.
Deja Entendu was an interesting attempt to reinvent themselves after just one album. And I don’t mean that in a bad way. Lacey and co. show on their sophomore album great maturity musically (even if it still is pretty basic, not lending itself to many repeat listens, and still containing those long, pithy song titles like “I Believe You, But My Tommy Gun Don’t”), but it’s, again, in the lyrics that make the album seem a lot better than it is. Lacey’s words are so self-reflexive and self-deprecating on the album that it’s no wonder on the next album we find him at his nadir. Consider these words from “I Will Play My Game Beneath the Spin Light,” probably the best song on
Deja Entendu:
I write more postcards than hooks/I read more maps than books/I feel like every chance to leave is another chance I should have took/ Every minute is a mile/I’ve never felt so hollow/I’m an old, abandoned church with broken pews and empty aisles/My secrets for a buck/Watch me as I cut myself wide open on this stage, oh I am paid to spill my guts/I won’t see home ‘till Spring/Oh, I would kill for the Atlantic, but I am paid to make girls panic while I sing.
All throughout their sophomore album, Brand New reflect on what it is to be popular in “the scene.” They admit to loving it (from the same song: “Know we do this ‘cause we care not for the thrill.”), but one gets the sense while listening to
Deja Entendu that they weren’t doing it on their terms; that they wanted to be more than just people who make girls scream. You got the sense that they weren’t satisfied with how people viewed them as musicians. Lacey literally warns us of the change to come with the final song “Play Crack the Sky” where he sings “this is the end…” as a final nail in the
Deja Entendu coffin. Things are going to be different.
And even though
Deja Entendu was light years better musically than
Your Favorite Weapon, they still had work to do and something to prove. This reflection and overall dissatisfaction with the process and workings of the music machine (and the inadequacies that the creators of that work feel during the process) would be fine-tuned during the next evolutionary step for the band – a three year-plus process of writing, recording, scrapping songs, and starting over anew – allowing them to come to terms with their imperfection and finally complete and release their magnum opus.
