Concert Review
By Ryan Sartor
As rock screamers Brand New took the stage Thursday night, they did not conjure up images of musicians ready to play, but rather a group of priests preparing for holy mass—albeit in ratty t-shirts and jeans. The reverence with which Brand New is treated by its fans (and to a lesser extent, how the band treats itself) is sort of an anomaly. Their debut album, “Your Favorite Weapon”, was not dissimilar from other work in the pop/punk/emo factory that produced bands like Taking Back Sunday and New Found Glory. But in the years that followed, Brand New consistently showed contempt for their listeners, releasing the moody, depressing, but melodic and harmony-infused “Deja Entendu”(an album that felt ambitious enough to make them the heir apparent to Radiohead), only to follow that up with the even more moody and depressing, although stripped of any pleasant sounds, “The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me”, which with its slow-building, go-nowhere tracks and incessant screaming, felt like a band refusing to give their listeners anything to enjoy.
Such an attitude can lead to backlash, but Brand New’s fans embraced this attitude, wanting all the more to know what they had done to upset lead singer Jesse Lacey, begging him to please love them. Lacey and his band mates upped the ante with 2009’s “Daisy”, a screaming escapade through anger and misunderstanding, which would never have been mistaken for the work of a band that penned the tongue-in-cheek song “Jude Law and a Semester Abroad” if their moniker didn’t accompany both LPs.
In a 2009 interview with music magazine “Kerrang!”, Lacey described the making of “Daisy” by saying, “We were thinking a lot more about what we'd want to play when we were up onstage rather than actually what you'd want to hear on a record.”
Seeing the band on stage, this statement makes all kinds of sense. The incessant screaming in half of the songs shouldn’t work, but it does. The melodies buried in “The Devil and God” and “Daisy” come roaring to the front, and the capacity crowd in Allentown (who all seemed to be 17-years-old, which could make one feel ancient) screamed along to just about every tune. There were a few concert-goers who remained silent during tracks from Brand New’s later albums, but these people were rocking out with them best of them as the band powered through their early hits. In recent tours, Brand New would play a few songs from “Deja Entendu” and one from “Your Favorite Weapon”, but at the Croc Rock, they performed six “Deja” songs and four from “Your Favorite Weapon”. Granted, tracks from both albums were updated with Lacey’s screams and the band’s thrashing instrumentation, but fans were happy all the same. Unexpectedly, Brand New’s early tracks (featuring impossibly immature lyrics like, “I hope the next boy that you kiss has something terribly contagious on his lips”) feel completely at home next to their more recent, contemplative efforts: through sheer will, Brand New pushes early naught pop/punk whine-o tracks through the crucible of legitimacy.
Throughout the show (which lasted nearly two hours), there was crowd surfing and a few impromptu mosh pits, but just as often fans were singing with their eyes closed, on the verge of tears, connecting with the band in a way that is rare for even the most intimate shows. Concert-goers came from New York and New Jersey, eager to worship at the altar of Brand New. It would be foolish to predict what their next album will sound like, though at a Baltimore concert two days before their show in Allentown, Lacey told the audience the band was “tired of bumming you guys out. We’re trying to write something happy.” Listening to the band’s records, one could be forgiven for thinking Brand New never cares about their fans’ happiness. At the Croc Rock Thursday night, they proved nothing could be further from the truth—at least for this tour.
