Review Summary: This is hitting rock bottom.
I am fine to put a gun to my life
And I know I’m scared it won’t fire
You won’t know, you won’t know
You won’t know, you won’t know
Even Poe wasn’t this depressed. Poetry this telling is so startling coming from the same person that wrote “Last Chance To Lose Your Keys”. Can we even infer it is the same man or the same band? What happened after those demos leaked? Why was Mike Sapone kept in the dark about the recording? Jesse Lacey taunts us.
You won’t know, you won’t know
This is a man detached from every thing he once knew. Gone are the witty verses and boyish charm that gave them their bite. Now he writes-
I used to pray like God was listening
I used to make my parents proud
I was the glue that kept my friends together
Now they don’t talk and we don’t go out
Nothing here is radio friendly. This is the work of a man who spent sleepless nights questioning God and screaming in the dark. This is man who crawled deep into the gloomy depths of his own soul and found Limousine (MS Rebridge) in a small dark room. This is what happens when early mornings are spent penning regrets into verses because sleep never came, and when fears are belted over choruses while nothing but resentment feeds guitar lines. Maybe we are better off not knowing what he meant when he yelled “Alkaline” in Degausser. It is Emerson who said after all that a man is only half himself, the other half is his expression.
We can still be, ever so slightly, assured that we will never have to experience what Brand New has felt. Some of us are much better off never knowing what it feels like to have the floor pulled from under our feet, to feel as if happiness as we used to know it will never be attainable, to find our selves so lonely that the warmth of a friend will never be felt again.
But forget the creative drum fills. Disregard Vinnie Accardi’s obsession with distortion. Embrace, if for only a moment, the barely audible entity speaking to you in “Untitled” because even if you cannot understand its message right now there is still inherent meaning. It is when we can acknowledge this, this strange but somehow familiar sound leading us into the dark, when we can finally let go and accept what we are, what is and not what can be, that we may finally be content with our lives. For Brand New there is no going back.
