![]() The album received very positive reviews and has since been placed on numerous lists as one of the greatest albums of the decade and from the emo genre. Its commercial success led to Brand New signing with DreamWorks/ Interscope Records shortly after. It was certified Gold nearly four years after its release. Glory Fades" both reached the top 40 in the United Kingdom Singles Chart and earned MTV airplay. The album, considered the band's "breakthrough", was Brand New's first to chart in the United States (at number 63), and its two singles " The Quiet Things That No One Ever Knows" and " Sic Transit Gloria. It was widely praised for showing the band's maturation from their pop punk debut Your Favorite Weapon, and critics described the album as the moment when the band "started showing ambition to look beyond the emo/post-hardcore scene that birthed them." " The Quiet Things That No One Ever Knows"ĭeja Entendu ( French for " already heard") is the second studio album by American rock band Brand New, released on Jby Triple Crown Records and Razor & Tie.It's peaceful, and calls to mind an image of flowers growing at a grave instead of unseen abominations haunting an empty house. The beginning sounds like a found footage tape, retroactive proof of a ghost’s discontent. The atmospheric end of the album, "Batter Up," is the peaceful dénouement that I needed after the tense, spooky, off-kilter nature of the album's beginning. Where Science Fiction is concerned, it's the reality that they are out of time, left behind in an artistic space that will always have room for them but no longer feeds the soul or spirit in concern. He starts the song singing "Last night I heard a voice that said, 'This is the end,'/All my nerves have been worn to the threads/I got my faith, I got my family/I got a wire fence around my whole stake." But only a verse later, his words become "I made it clear to him what fear of God means/I'd hold him down on the the Tompkins Lake/Before I ever let him go to the wolves." It's verbiage familiar to anyone who's peeked at the darkest corners of fanatical devotion, at the white-hot fear of something different and scary. Later on in the record, Lacey's perspective on the end becomes a meditation on the destruction that comes from holding on too tight, in "Desert." It's the transformation from hugging to smothering, the way a blanket wraps around you in the middle of the night and squeezes you so tight that your mind conjures the image of being trapped in the coils of a python. It's a death that's ultimately welcome for Brand New in the final lines: "We're so afraid, I prayed and prayed/When God told me to love the bomb." "137" pines about being vaporized by an Atomic Bomb, starting at a sparse, plaintive perspective on being left alone before exploding into a crashing wave of distortion and feedback. Musing about death in the abstract is far less noteworthy than musing about death when you're at its door. What makes Science Fiction so striking, to me, is the way in which they feel so much more palpable. Lyrics run through the metaphor of demise aren't new for the group, nor for the genre at all. The album itself is dense, thematically obsessed with death and also anchored around what sound like recordings from therapy patients and old military transmissions. Whether it was lyrically in songs like "Luca" or allusions on their merchandise (the shirts released preceding their final record was ominously labeled '2000-2018'), death was an approaching finish line that gave the band an aura that their peers never had. Since at least 2006's The Devil and God are Raging Inside Me, the band has faced their demise and embraced that it would end eventually. As it turned out, for many fans, the fact that the band was prefacing this album's release with the revelation that it would be their final album was only new in the sense that it was stated so plainly this time around.įor the most part, Brand New was a band who constantly drafted the final part of their story. Science Fiction was the first record I got to experience in real time. I'd hear about them on a part of a tour with a band like Manchester Orchestra, or find recordings of their live performances in my YouTube suggestions, but it was all done from the perspective of hindsight. ![]() Bordering on reclusive, the band struck me as musical poltergeists: not always there in front of the face, but usually in the corner of the mind's eye. ![]() By that point, it was easy for me to look back and develop a retrospective understanding of the legacy they'd built. When Brand New came into my world, they were already four albums in.
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