(desperation + noise)

There are places that grow chaotic with life, plants encircling each other with alternating abandon and care, cradling each other, running each other through—products of an extreme desire for self-preservation that society affords when it swells and spreads like a dark bruise.

There are places where everything is dead and has retreated back into the ground for further defenses, and these further defenses have incidentally abandoned this black rock for soils less irreparably toxic, more expansive and teeming with hot fertile life. They have given up their mothers to these gray visions of mortality, in which they drink several seasons of black water and sit still and calm, waiting for the sun to burn them through. Every so often there is a twitch of fire from these patient years of dry friction. The only light left is destructive light.

Someone stands over them and feels the abyss expand cancerous in the stomach, a feeling particular to moments when the things that you dedicate yourself to refuse to yield, though it is wrong to have expected it of them.

Brand New’s third album, The Devil and God are Raging Inside Me, is where everything seemed quite prepared to walk into this fire, more than adequately steeled against the harsh curves of blackened flesh. Historically, Brand New have favored, instead of linear growth, grand lunges at the timeline’s punctuated neck. So, no, despite how metaphors work, this new record/howl in the long fields, Daisy is not the resultant burning or even the grafting of new skin. It is perhaps years later, when one examines the reasoning behind these immolating acts and, instead of feeling the mere soft blows of long-passed trauma, all of these old impulses, unsullied by time, rise to the surface like fat dead stomachs.

You are familiar with the feeling of reentering your past rooms which have corners that do not favor long stares but at which regardless you stare, for in them you see tiny, frail versions of yourself reenacting past regrets. You know full well what horrors await you beneath your fingernails. You know that it will be much worse this time, that despite your magnified height and weight these creatures shall be magnified twofold. There will come a day where you are cognizant of all the glass in the carpet. You will no longer wonder why it enters your hair and skin with such aplomb. Why your cuts invite you into their raw folds.

Some disembodied voice croons “On Life’s Highway” as though afterward she will offer her body to the current so she may join her love in the holy fields, her desperate song hewn from the wood of the soul. But guitars abruptly atomize it, appearing like sudden growths in the sky. There is so much said of Brand New’s impossible growth from Your Favorite Weapon’s pitiless pop-punk, songs in which people sliced themselves on table edges just to prove to themselves that their blood is not rotted and black. These are entirely justified impulses. And as much as I favor any history whose arc is evolution, Daisy is not so far removed from this space where nothing grows. There’s a similar rebuilding of these mistakes with teeth, there’s a similar goring to endure.

For instance, in “At the Bottom,” which, yes, occupies the bottom—what else does it have to do with its life but inhabit the plane where codependency acts in drugs and death, where we pass and receive the bottle with our impossibly trembling hands—there’s admission that one can never really move on from Your Favorite Weapon:

We never are what we intend
Or invent

This has gotten the better of them. This has gotten the better of me. This is a post-hardcore record that has lived with the trauma so long that it is now indistinguishable from the trauma, even when removed to these long paragraphs about damage and detritus. When Jesse Lacey sings that he is on his way to hell it is no defiant gesture, it is fated resignation. The digging is automatic at this point.