Brand New - Science Fiction (2017)

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Brand New - Science Fiction (2017)

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Brand New’s fifth album stands as a monument to their gradual evolution. It is a wise and vulnerable conclusion for a rock band who were crucial in shaping a scene, a sound, and many emotions.

The eight years of psychotic speculation ahead of Brand New’s forever-delayed “LP5” did more for the band’s legacy than topping Deja Entendu or The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me ever could. This fan fervor lent the album a mythical status typically granted to someone who died or disappeared. Objectively, it’s been 14 years since “The Quiet Things That No One Ever Knows” peaked at No. 37 on Billboard’s Alternative chart, eight since Daisy, their most recent and least loved studio album, and they’ve toured both clubs and festivals regularly in the time since. The excitement surrounding Science Fiction now that it has arrived is faintly tempered by the thudding finality of it all: “#thisIsTheLastOne” and the “Brand New 2000 - 2018” t-shirts are a statement of fact. But to put it in his own words, “LP5” was a millstone around Jesse Lacey’s neck. Science Fiction turns it into a monument.

As they’ve done throughout their two decades, Brand New defy expectations to a degree that can make even their most beloved past work feel short-sighted. If the streamlined pop-punk throwback singles “I Am a Nightmare” and “Mene” were eventually bundled into Science Fiction, it might’ve been the equivalent of that oft-fantasized Radiohead album where they returned to The Bends; a satisfying capitulation to fans who refused to evolve along with the band. Instead, from its opening invocation of burning witches, Science Fiction is most similar to A Moon Shaped Pool: We’ve never heard this band be this quiet or this gracious about aging. And it’s unnerving because an infamously inscrutable frontman drops his defenses and finally becomes vulnerable, like he knows this might very well be the last time he gets the chance.

Lacey’s long-lasting aversion to talking about himself and his music is completely at odds with the band’s most popular work—his logorrheic lyrics inspired thousands of LiveJournal status updates lost to the digital dustbin of history, only to be salvaged decades later at jam-packed Emo Nights across the country. Given that 2003’s Deja Entendu was essentially a concept record about Brand New’s conflict with modest fame, how much could we trust Science Fiction if Lacey hadn’t mentioned the rise in expectations during his transformation from Warped Tour pin-up to musical prophet? “Got my messiah impression, I think I got it nailed down,” Lacey sarcastically self-harmonizes during the one song that evokes Deja Entendu in both shout-along catharsis and Brand New meta-criticism. The real punchline, though, is the chorus: “I’ve got a positive message, sometimes I can’t get it out.” Sure, if we could all constantly radiate love for everyone and shrug off our demons, maybe Brand New wouldn’t need to exist. But Lacey was built to fight through all this to the bitter end.

Science Fiction doesn’t provide much joy beyond its mordant humor, but using the acidic feel of “old Brand New” as a counterpoint, it resonates longer, has more gravitas, and carries the weight of earned wisdom. The candlelit “Could Never Be Heaven” expresses Lacey’s desire to be a reliable family man in his 40s with as much intensity as he once summoned to smite exes and Taking Back Sunday. On The Dark Side of the Moon and Antarctica hybrid “In the Water,” he warns, “‘Hide your daughters,’ the old men say/You were young once before, you know how we get our way,” and as the guy who admitted to doing just that on Deja Entendu’s dark and regrettable song “Me vs. Maradona vs. Elvis”, he should know. Likewise, centerpiece “Same Logic/Teeth” takes a stern but empathetic look at cyclical self-destruction: “Your friends are all imaginary/Your shrink stopped answering the phone/So you decide to make incisions at your home while you’re alone.”

While Science Fiction keeps the energy up with diamond-cut harmonies, howled hooks, and pithy quotables, it also blooms outward with new qualities: patience, long stretches of stillness, denial of easy answers, defiance. It’s bookended by two of Brand New’s lengthiest songs and certainly their most disquieting. Lacey dreams of bursting into flames through all of the nocturnal, dubbed-out opener “Lit Me Up,” yet never reaches above a mutter; he closes the album with the chilling guitar figures of “Batter Up” turning into white ash, like “Jesus Christ” given a Disintegration Loops treatment. They’re produced with astonishing clarity and detail by longtime “fifth member” Mike Sapone like controlled burns. The stately balladry of “Waste” is slowly subsumed by guitarist Vinnie Accardi’s molten feedback, “451” and “Desert” recall the aggressive, parched blues of PJ Harvey or Feist’s Pleasure. By emphasizing closely-mic’d drums, live-room dynamics, and gristly, 3-D grain, Science Fiction creates an unusual intimacy despite its sweeping expanse, ensuring the listener never feels too far removed from Brand New even if they’re being projected on a festival screen.

For all of Brand New’s ambitions, it’s hard to recall a popular rock band making an album this crafty, this finely decorated without jettisoning the attributes of rock music. Accardi has been a key architect in the defining and redefining of Brand New’s sound, and Science Fiction features his most inventive textures and his proggiest soloing, mandolins and banjos, but also stiffly strummed power chords, intimate acoustic picking, and arena-ready anthems. This is populist rock music—outsized alternative rock—and the scope and scale is unique enough in 2017 to forgive the inevitable moments where Lacey could’ve used an editor, namely the indelicate Nagasaki and Wizard of Oz metaphors on “137” and “Could Never Be Heaven.”

If Brand New sonically recall the mid-90s, when emotionally fraught and morally conflicted guitar bands ruled the airwaves, no wonder they released Science Fiction into the unsuspecting world as 500 one-track CDs. From its arresting cover art to its careful sequencing, it’s an album that impresses with its carefully considered wholeness. It rigs even the potential “singles” with unexpected segues, trap doors, false endings, found sound, lo-fi vignettes, tape loops, and lyrical Easter eggs that either reference their past work or can easily be manipulated into doing so. “In the Water” ends with the same incantation that began “Daisy” and splices in a manipulated voice that blurts “seven years” seven times—an off-kilter reference to “Seventy Times 7”? Or the count-off from “Limousine”? Why is it seven years when Daisy came out eight years ago?

For years, Brand New obsessed over Science Fiction and it should be treated in kind. It secures their place in 21st-century rock music by re-establishing why a lot of their acolytes became musicians themselves. Whether it’s Manchester Orchestra’s blockbuster dirges, Lil Peep’s sweet and sour emo-rap, Julien Baker’s ecclesiastical confessionals, the cleansing emotional purge of Sorority Noise’s You’re Not As _____ As You Think, the caustic nu-grunge of Citizen, or even their choices in opening acts (Modern Baseball, Cloakroom, (Sandy) Alex G, Foxing), popular guitar music in 2017 has been undeniably shaped by Brand New, a band who has served not just as damaged role models but as a formative musical influence. And this was all before they provided an example of what all these bands could aspire to sound like in their 40s without disowning their younger, more dramatic selves. In death, they provide a last will and testament—if this truly is the end for Brand New, Science Fiction points a way forward for everyone else.