Brand New – Déja Entendu

 

I have always been impressed by Brand New’s ability to write songs with the tug and tenacity to pierce through my consciousness and become some sort of rambled soundtrack to my everyday life, even when they were just ‘that pop-punk band’ that was ‘good’ when I was, myself, rambling down the avid path of my teenage years. Jesse Lacey’s voice sounded half-broken and youthful, the lyrics to his songs sincere to the point of cringing – one song in particular even started a tit-for-tat lyrical argument with ex-friends Taking Back Sunday, such that the lyrics were so raw and cutting (of course, it was over a girl) now, you must go and listen to each of these songs one after the other to get the bigger picture – an earnest dig at boring adulthood and championing youth with wanting to “Stay eighteen forever…” as Lacey wistfully professes on Soco Amaretto Lime.

Of course, I realised this was a romantic fantasy upon my own nineteenth birthday when I finally believed in the inevitability of the rocking chair and the Sunday Newspapers. Luckily, the band realised this long before my own fuddled mind and then released a record that was to become one of their greatest defining moments as musicians thus far…Déjà Entendu.

I remember the day that I went out and brought that record like I remember my own mother’s face – it was a clear and bright sunny day over the summer holidays and I headed into the town with my good friend, both of us being 16/17yrs old at the time. We headed straight to the local and invariably excellent independent record store (when it was still fashionable to buy such things as stinking CDs) eager and frank about our intentions…buy the CD, get out of town, listen to pop-punk glory, call each other to talk about said pop-punk glory and bask in the general good-lookingness and talent of one of our most doodled-on-exercise-books bands.

But when I finally thwacked the CD into the player and sat expectantly on my bedroom carpet, I was shocked at what I heard – what was this? I had never heard anything quite like it – the downbeat and domineering bass, atmospheric and careful drumming, the moody melodies, the lyrics that cut straight to the core of things, the critically terrible conditions that the record arose in (read the liners – the band went through a terrible time of personal tragedy, I’m not sure they could have dedicated the record to more dead relatives if they’d tried and I’m sorry to sound cut-and-dried about this but creativity and genius often seem to be borne of such circumstances, unfortunately) and it felt like Lacey was really down in it, and he was doing that whole self-deprecating thing perfectly. Reality had hit; gone were the days of adolescent arguing over failed relationships via lyrics in your pop songs, this wasn’t NME; this was Hunter S. Thompson covering the ’72 Campaign Trail for Rolling Stone – classic.

It was so different to what I expected – and although it still had that rock/pop-punk edge to some of the songs, it was too depressing…I shut my curtains against the sun to read the lyrics with the songs and sank further into my carpet, slumped into the side of my bed. But this wasn’t Emo no; this was, at its nucleus, a pure indie album…with Lacey’s obvious interest in The Smiths finally making an appearance musically, albeit in unorthodox forms.

Autobiographical lyrics are the dominating draw to the album, for example a song like Me vs. Maradona vs. Elvis, where the protagonist confesses to getting a girl drunk and coercing her into sleeping with him just because he can and he will “Lie for fun, and fake the way I hold you and let you fall for every empty word I say…” the lyrics that are lulled over a simple strumming electric guitar and will leave you stunned that the protagonist could be so unclothed to the listener, so vulnerable in admitting his callousness with such dry wit. With song titles as diverse as Good To Know That If I Ever Need Attention All I Have To Do Is Die, or Okay, I Believe You But My Tommy Gun Don’t, the casual listener could be left with a vague sense of confusion…until the lyrics sweep through your body and wash over you as honest and as personal as a diary and as enrapturing as a piece of theatre evolving on the stage in front of you. All becomes clear.

And the way the album uses sudden tempo changes within the slower songs, letting the steady pace reach its expected musical climax in good time, naturally (a tool the band later tried to replicate to less effect, over-production) is mesmerizing, the whole album having an innately flowing coherence to it, unpretentious and touching, angry and catchy, lyrical genius…culminating in the heart-wrenching Play Crack The Sky, Lacey’s fictional story about a boat sinking and two lovers drowning together in the icy waters, his keening voices looped into intense harmonies with themselves over soft acoustic guitar, a torturous listen in the story’s own catastrophic joy. If nothing, the band are great story-tellers…and surely that is what good lyricists and musicians are? For what is music if it can’t tell you something, communicate with you in ways you do and do not even realise? I want to hear the story of this record again and again and again…

But it seemed, all this was not enough to satisfy the indie purists, the puritanical closed-minded bastards with the good dress sense; rarely will you find one of those types professing serious love for Déjà Entendu, this era-defining, youthful, fucking honey pot of a record that just keeps giving and fuck it…must’ve influence hundreds of musicians since. And why? They started off as a pop-punk band of course…whether this means that the indie purists haven’t even had the chance to discover the record yet or that they’re just too scared to admit they like it due to ego purposes (the possibility that they don’t genuinely like the thing is…a small one). Brand New deserve a seat in the history books for creating something different that wasn’t around at that time and defining an era in so many people’s lives with something classier, something challenging and something truly, truly wonderful (whilst the realisation struck that no, we would not be eighteen forever). A record that quietly slipped under the radar of those who came to it late, but continues to create far-reaching ripples in the music scene because of Brand New’s dedicated integrity in making the thing. I’m not sure they’ll ever be able to achieve something as significant again, and really when you listen to Déjà Entendu, that’s not altogether a bad lot by any musician’s standards.

 Brand New – ‘Play Crack the Sky’:

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