Brand New tackles American identity and the politics of letting go in long-awaited fifth album
“SCIENCE FICTION”
On Tuesday, August 15th, the Internet began murmuring as the announcement of a limited edition LP from the infamous Long Island indie rock outfit, Brand New, was slated to hit shelves in October.
On Thursday, fans on the band’s original mailing list received a mysterious package: a CD crudely labeled with the GPS coordinates for Devils Tower National Monument (featured in the climax of Steven Spielberg’s iconic Close Encounters of the Third Kind), an insert including quotes from 2001: A Space Odyssey, and a single 61-minute long track. Later that evening, Science Fiction, Brand New’s eagerly anticipated fifth album was wide-released, signifying the beginning of a new chapter in the band’s journey since 2000: the end.
For a fan of a band characterized by the frustration of slow-bleed releases in between little to no media presence, and often times, a presumed contempt and reproach towards the listeners with ears constantly trained on the Brand New camp, the finality of Science Fiction brings with it a sort of bittersweet reconciliation. Alongside cryptic whispers that Jesse Lacey & Co. plan to disband next year after eighteen years as a millennial pop-punk staple, the deliberate tone of the album, that of a swan song, reads like an unsurprising terminal diagnosis. You can have hope for the future, but it’s best to close your eyes to three chords and the truth and enjoy the following twelve tracks.
Whether or not Lacey is reckoning with the demons of his past or those very much alive and well in the world today is up to the audience, but it goes without saying that we may all spin this record believing that it is the beginning of the end of something many years in the making.
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Much like 2006’s standout, The Devil And God Are Raging Inside Me, Lacey peppers Science Fiction with plenty of character-driven storytelling (and in those cases, a duality that reflects on his own inner monologue, underlying struggles, and personal experiences) that fixates on conclusions: of relationships, mankind, cultural eras, and lives.
In track number three, “Waste,” we’re dropped into a conversation between two individuals (“Don’t lose hope my son / This is the last one”) that begs the explanation: is this Lacey talking to his younger self promising the light at the end of the tunnel that delivers him from the manifestations of crippling depression? Is this the last nervous cigarette, the last mind-numbing hit, the last night bleeding out on the bathroom floor? Or, is this a much more literal ultimatum between friends, lovers, confidantes at the hands of addiction (“I’m hoping that in time you can lay down / All this weight you’ve been carrying around / And for the last time / Yeah, you say goodbye”)?
Three tracks later, “137” literally addresses nuclear annihilation and mutually assured destruction. The element caesium-137 is a radioactive byproduct of uranium present in nuclear reactors and wasn’t detectable in the Earth’s atmosphere prior to the atomic detonations in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which becomes strikingly clear in the lyric: “Let’s all go play at Nagasaki / What a lovely place to die / The final show where we all go / So we never have to say goodbye.” If one wanted to dive even deeper into lyrical allusion in terms of endings, they could argue the song also addresses a relinquishing of faith as Lacey engages in a philosophical debate with God; “Before the Garden / When you were all alone / You made the atom / Is that some kind of inside joke / Let’s load the gun / See how long they last,” asking why would a benevolent entity give the thing it loves most a definitive means to an end: the capacity for self-inflicted death, erasure, and the lack of compassion to forge ahead with both?
Speaking for the record as a whole, the final track and magnum opus, “Batter Up,” is the only song to suggest any sort of continuation (“Batter up / It’s never going to stop”), yet even its verses speak in the past tense and all eight minutes sound like a methodical funeral dirge sending Brand New off into the swirling ether that is nonexistence after nearly two decades of a tumultuous love affair with their fans (“You were all I see / You were everything / Cast about you / Turning up your gravity / Pull me in or under / Died and returned to the Earth / Found ourselves back in love”).
As if it weren’t painting with a heavy enough thematic brush, Science Fiction also grapples with its place in the current American political climate. Whether that choice was intentional or not, it only makes the record more incredible and cohesive, as it has been somewhere between two and seven years in the making and yet still emerges so culturally relevant, if not tailor made, to the very week it was released. In that regard, the title is well-deserved: the constant chaos unfolding in the world — the frustration, the unrest, all seemingly at the hands of a malicious government — used to be just the plot of a novel set in the distant, dystopian future a la 1984 but has now become the reality we find ourselves forced to live. In terms of “science fiction,” it is a genre best known for encompassing cautionary tales and promises of the times ahead — exactly what Lacey is not-so-subtly hinting at in each song; each glimpsing into the future, whether societally in a storm of political angst, the band’s own demise looming on the horizon, or perhaps his own presence — resignation from the music scene that raised him and from the role in which listeners have come to revere him.
“Lit Me Up” sets the tone of the album on all accounts. It is a song about frustration long ingrained that carries a strong, politically pertinent message:
“Something’s stirring in a deep Atlantic trench / Doesn’t forget the thousand years before it slept.”
This is the imagery of civil unrest, plain and simple. The only matter up for interpretation is whether or not it is referencing the growing angst of white, patriarchal coal country (which in the last year since the song has gone into production has come to a Trumpian head) or the ongoing plight of women, people of color, and the LGBTQ+ community in the face of civil rights, which in the age of the Internet and a twenty-four hour news cycle has all of a sudden been dragged to the front and center of the national conversation as if it’s a new or trendy phenomenon.
“It’s where you live / But you don’t know how it’s been” seems to calls out Washington and out of touch politicians, “armchair activists,” the bleeding heart college Democrats, the rednecks, and your drunk uncle at the Thanksgiving table: according to the opposite side, every demographic is fighting for or against something that’s so far removed from reality that it can’t be seen from outside of the beholder’s own terms and conditions.
I can only speak from the place of a white, solidly middle-class woman’s perspective, just as I’m sure Lacey is coming at it from that of a white American dude who’s doing okay by society’s standards, and not to stoke the controversial #notallmen fire, but I believe that is where the pain is translated from: “When I grow up / I want to be a heretic.” In verse three is where the song’s difficult political commentary comes alive. This is Lacey directly addressing his listeners. To be a heretic is to go against recognized doctrine — in this case, the standing political implication of being a white, straight, American man. “I want to climb over the wall / ’Cause I’m not on the list” conjures the literal image of scaling Forty-Five’s notorious border wall, but as a white man, this administration’s agenda doesn’t affect Lacey, so he won’t even be given the option to do what he sees as right thing in rebelling in the first place. This is met with the hopelessness of desire (“I want to put my hands to work / Until the work is done / I want to open my heart like the ocean”): the desire of the “good guys” to serve as allies to those oppressed or under fire, but don’t know what their role is or should be; the intermingled desire to champion and the fruitless despair of recognizing you’re just one person.
Yet, while Lacey paints an inclusive picture in “Lit Me Up,” on track nine, “Desert,” he stakes his ideological claim and makes the homespun white male much less sympathetic in pointed, caricatural meter: “I seen those boys kissing boys / With their mouth on the street / But I raised my son to be a righteous man / I made it clear what a fear of God means.”
He damns intolerant conservative fundamentalism driven by fear mongering and paranoia, calling out American traditionalism: “Last night I heard a voice say ‘Don’t give up your gun’ / Those bleedin’ hearts come marching down my road / I got one with your name on it.”
But don’t be confused — Lacey doesn’t just dole out criticism to one side. He begs to question the whole of a country involved, which is wrapped up neatly between bookends in “Lit Me Up’s” intro and outro: “While I don’t mind having all this going on inside of me, I think I’m going to be relieved when it’s over and I can settle back down” / “It was a good dream.” In relation to today’s political tendencies and the theme of the song, what do these sentiments mean? When 45 has either run his course or the country has run him out, will things go “back to normal?” And what does that even mean? Will our society have changed for the better and finally heeded centuries of mistakes? Or will all the political upheaval merely be cast out of the spotlight and America will go back to business as usual where injustice and prejudice returns to breeding under cover of darkness, away from public scrutiny, as the whistleblowing and watchdogging by the country at large disappears? Or…is it exciting to be alive during these times but better to expire at a high point when we’ve all been united for a brief moment in our shared outrage or our common interests, knowing that human nature and the cemented power structures it supports will never change (“It was a good dream”)? This proves there’s something deeply poetic and unifying in the song, but still dangerously cynical — not unlike the events that have unfolded in the streets of the United States since November 2016.
However, political motives aside, the prominence of white supremacy, the emboldening of bigotry, and the rise of The Resistance — they’re all born of something outside of civic motivation. They all encompass identity. Our beliefs are tied so deeply to who we imagine we are at the very heart as conscious human beings, and when a campaign (now presidency) is painted on a canvas as stark as Good versus Evil, we fight for our role as the “good guy” even more ruthlessly. If we’re somehow faced with the possibility that we were wrong — and in the face of regimes who equate “wrong” with “evil,” not mistaken, not misguided, not differing in opinion, but “evil’ — an identity crisis is inescapable. So perhaps in its potentially unintentional political arguments is where Science Fiction finds its footing, however, I believe it is rooted the strongest in the overarching question of identity: either in terms of finding it or abandoning it.
Despite all of the left turns from the band’s origins in pop-punk and college radio emo, each song is quintessentially Brand New. Sonically and lyrically, there are so many similarities to albums past that you could spend an entire afternoon making a string plot spanning the last eighteen years of releases, however, in the warbly, drop-pitch, cartoonish vocals at 2:44 of “Same Logic/Teeth” that are reminiscent of late Modest Mouse, the rambling, rolling, almost tongue-in-cheek nod to the great guitar licks of classic rock in “451,” and the frenzied fretwork that seems more at home on a Dillinger Escape Plan or Mars Volta record, Science Fiction seems to draw more inspiration from everything but its own namesake’s discography. That doesn’t stop each song from aching of Brand New at its core.
It’s those left turns that drive the whole purpose of Science Fiction home. Lacey is coming to terms that this record isn’t spitting the same brand of coming-of-age venom as Deja Entendu or waxing poetic at the same one hundred raw, screaming decibels as Daisy. As a musician, he’s bled down several different stylistic sleeves, and as a person, he’s found himself on a very different path as compared to what seemed inevitable after the relatively under-appreciated release of Your Favorite Weapon sixteen years ago.
With the reckoning with and acceptance of one sense of self comes the release of another. Since 2000, Brand New has been Lacey’s sole identity as far as even the most faithful of listeners are concerned and this record is either the attempt or the preparation to shed those layers in favor of just Jesse.
While it seems too early to cast complete judgment, Science Fiction already rivals, if not has the potential to best, both fan and critically commended Deja Entendu and TDAGARIM as the band’s most intricate and accomplished work to date. However, I believe with age, it will be viewed as less of a competitor and more of a culmination, musically and emotionally, of a career’s worth of effort and achievements. A graceful exit on the highest note of symphony; a sentiment echoed in Brand New’s perennial encore song “Soco Amaretto Lime,” the following lyric of which has been established as scripture by the eyeliner punks and rainy day kids of the alternative music scene for nearly two decades:
“I’m gonna stay eighteen forever.”
