TOP X ALBUMS OF MMIX: II

II. Daisy (by) Brand New

Indie / Post-Hardcore / Noise-Rock

Brand New releases an album. The majority of critics give it fantastic reviews. The majority of Brand New fans hear the album, realize it sounds nothing like their last album and immediately hate it. Half of Brand New's fans bail. Well, they're not a band for casual listeners, and this music is anything but: dense and schizophrenic, listening to Daisy is meant to be an unsettling experience. The band has claimed they'd rather make an album that 50% of people hate and 50% of people love than album that everyone kind-of likes, and that's exactly what you have here.

Brand New's lyrical themes have always come together with a clash of contrasts, balancing the narcissism of youth with frontman Jesse Lacey's obsession with death. Songs often seemed to capture a particular sort of violent, spontaneous human interaction, even if heavily buried in metaphor. After a few spins of Daisy, it seems inevitable in hindsight that their sound would shift toward such dynamics as well. Brand New have become full-on composers of noise, dissonance and bizarre inversions. Rather than writing hooks, the band teases twisted squeals and frenetic shredding out of their instruments, savoring every strange tone. Backing guitars sometimes provide rhythm—and sometimes rumble forward in the mix with a sound like a chainsaw revving. This, in the end, is why Daisy works so well: when Brand New does something, they do it well, and I've heard few other bands that are able to use background instrumentation to such unique effect, or craft unorthodox dissonance with such personality.

Daisy is perfectly produced to capture the whole unsettling unfair, and the compositions are so detailed and well-constructed as to make the madness accessible. It was always atmosphere that drew me to Brand New, after all—a sense of mood and tone that their contemporaries lacked before and utterly abandoned by now. Thanks to a clanky, textured tone and aggressive presence in the mix, the bass guitar ends up being one of the most interesting elements on the album. But all instruments serve two roles—you'll also find that same bass doing epically fuzzy slides through the chorus of "You Stole", creating an effect that sounds not-unlike a whale giving birth. It's but one aspect of the tense unpredictable energy that carries the album. Many reviewers and detractors have made comparisons to The Jesus Lizard (or Modest Mouse) and Nirvana. While Brand New has always admitted inspiration from these (and many other) bands, the differences remain stark: where the previous bands chug away at songs with raucously loose, drunken energy—creating the dynamic instability which evokes these comparisons—Daisy is both more conscious of its unbalanced style and unhinged in its execution, creating more forceful guitar delivery, far tighter song structures and a more textured take on "noise rock" aesthetics.

That a band is able to adapt their style so casually while still retaining the sensibilities that make each album recognizably Brand New is no small accomplishment—but each album has to be good on its own, for its own merits, and Daisy succeeds against all odds (and in spite of its flaws, which are certainly there). It isn't a perfectly executed album, nor a contender for their best, but I found myself listening to Daisy more than any other album in 2009. Brand New is clearly a little bit crazy—enough to piss off the people who buy their albums and thereby ensure that they keep putting out good ones.