Review Summary: Swan song
It feels almost poetic that Brand New broke up in a wave of controversy mere weeks after releasing their final album,
Science Fiction. It felt fitting that they disappeared off the face of the earth with a whimper, not a bang. The Long Island five-piece always kept to themselves, rarely if ever doing press releases, announcing tours without any pomp or circumstance. Hell,
Science Fiction itself was announced only two months before its release in October 2017. The band made it known that this, their fifth LP, would be their last.
After eight years of near total silence, the announcement of
Science Fiction came as a shock. As a long-standing Brand New fan, I was concerned. What if this new album was crap? What if it was bland? Forgettable? The inevitable and inescapable hype around
Science Fiction made the possibility of it
not being a masterpiece all the more worrisome. And even if it
was good, it could surely never topple the alternative juggernaut that is
The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me, could it?
I would love to say that I was convinced of
Science Fiction’s genius from minute one. I got hold of the hour long mp3 that was ripped from the nondescript CDs that Brand New sent to a select few fans. I turned the lights off in my bedroom and listened to it, headphones on, start to finish. And, to my dismay, I thought it was
fine. The distinct influence of grunge on Can’t Get It Out, Out of Mana and No Control was not to my immediate tastes. Opener Lit Me Up was excellent, closer Batter Up likewise, but there seemed to be something missing from this final effort. Outside of one passage on one song, where were the screams? Where were the enormous, post-rock-esque crescendos that littered Brand New’s previous two LPs? It had been eight years since the band had released anything substantial, but this still felt like a significant departure from the Brand New we had come to love. I found myself somewhat disappointed that I wasn’t just listening to
The Devil and God Part II.
I was, to be short, naïve.
Science Fiction is awash with depth and colour, to an extent that none of their previous albums even come close. Scattered across the album are references to previous songs and LPs, both subtle and overt in their presentation. Lyrical themes make a case for the band accepting its fate, as a group of men nearing their forties. And throughout
Science Fiction’s sixty-one minutes runs a narrative of self-deprecation and self-hatred, the therapy required to overcome those feelings, and some form of resolution and acceptance by the album’s close. It is only through multiple listens that this narrative becomes clear. Brand New know who they were and who they are, and they are making a case for who they want to be in their retirement.
It is surely no coincidence that
Science Fiction has this overarching narrative, as it can be seen to represent the band’s discography as a whole. Early tracks Can’t Get It Out and Waste refer directly to the ‘salad days’, where in
Your Favourite Weapon and
Deja Entendu frontman Jesse Lacey would scream about his woes without any intention of doing anything about them. Same Logic/Teeth refers to the heyday of the band, the
The Devil and God years, where kids would scream and shout to see them, but the fame felt empty. And of course, the closing portion of In the Water directly references the title track of
Daisy, the distinctly angry album that preceded
Science Fiction.
Science Fiction is not angry. At least, not in the same way that
Daisy is. No,
Science Fiction is an album of introspection after a fifteen-year career. It is an exhausted album, one that screams of a band trying its absolute best to take solace in what really matters. An exploration of love, in amongst a sea of self-hatred. And that is what makes it so meaningful.
For a year of my life, shortly before the outbreak of the Covid pandemic, I took a weekly 90-minute drive into London to see a therapist, in order to finally bring myself out of the malaise I had been experiencing quietly for the previous three years, and loudly for the previous six months. I would stop at a service station for twenty minutes to get lunch before continuing the final half hour to my therapist’s house; the journey from my home to this stop was almost exactly an hour.
Science Fiction was my soundtrack for that hour. Every Wednesday, same journey, same album. Because I too was feeling the emotions that Jesse Lacey so vividly explores in this album. I too began obsessed with the emptiness of what I had previously thought were my salad days. And, like on
Science Fiction, I too began to see a light at the end of the tunnel.
Batter Up is the only way that Brand New could have ended their careers. An eight-minute odyssey, drenched in metaphor, speaking of regret, the fear of ageing, the sensation of otherness. But lying beneath the surface of
Science Fiction’s closer is an acceptance and an invitation. ‘We have done what we set out to do, for better or worse. Now it’s time for you to take up the mantle’. And, just like that, the album ends. And with it goes the career of one of the most influential bands of the 21st century.
It is perhaps in bad taste for me to write this review. My connection to
Science Fiction is my own, but that does not ignore the controversy surrounding Jesse Lacey and Brand New’s swan song being cut short because of it. The fact of the matter is, though, that
Science Fiction is still what it was when it released in August 2017. Its quality has not diminished due to the actions of one man. It is a personal, intimate exploration of an ageing giant of the music scene, and stands alone above the records that preceded it.
