With 2006’s The Devil and God are Raging Inside Me, Brand New set a new standard for alternative rock bands, showing that introspective lyrics and pained wailing could be accompanied by more than three-chord nonsense. It was, in every sense of the word, a triumph. It’s with that in mind that I listen to Daisy, the New York outfit’s fourth album and feel slightly betrayed. Where previous Brand New albums were meticulously arranged and performed, Daisy’s madness appears to have no method to it, and comes out sounding like an unfocused, broken mishmash of ideas that never quite resolve into anything.
The album opens and closes with an excerpt of the classic gospel hymn “On Life’s Highway” tacked onto the actual songs. This would be fine if I felt that the intro and outro served any greater purpose other than “It’s weird and unexpected”. But on “Vices”, it just serves as a method of catching the listener off-guard before the onslaught of screaming. This reversal would be enticing and exciting if it in turn led to another and another, but from there we just get “Bed” and single “At the Bottom”, two fairly by the numbers Brand New songs. Again, Daisy is less an album about themes or ideas and more about what the band thought would sound cool. From any one of a hundred other bands, this would be acceptable, even laudable. But Brand New set the bar so high with their last album that the fact that most of Daisy comes out sounding like a rehash of Devil and God (“You Stole”, “Gasoline”) or just flat out weird for weird’s sake (the filler track “Be Gone”, “”).
That said, not all of Daisy is unlistenable. Even a mediocre Brand New song is better than most of the band’s contemporaries (read: Taking Back Sunday, The Spill Canvas, New Found Glory), and Jesse Lacey is a remarkable songwriter. So when Brand New sticks to what works on “At The Bottom” and the title track, Daisy shows promise. Even in this misfire of a record, Brand New manage to maintain their status as the most hardworking, underappreciated alternative rock band around. There’s a good album in Daisy somewhere, but its a 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle that got spilled all over the floor.
Final Score: 5.5/10
Brand New – At The Bottom [iTunes] (YSI)
==TJ==
