![]() ![]() In its time away, the group has been playing sleight-of-hand tricks with its own career: touring sparingly, releasing the occasional single, stimulating speculation about when it might return to the studio or break up for good. It's a record that pummels you, asks you to seek light at the end of tunnel, and it will be here forever.Science Fiction is Brand New's fifth album, its first in eight years - and, if you believe the rumors that it plans to retire in 2018, possibly its last. By pushing their scope, Brand New created a dark, intense and emotionally complex album. By cutting to the core of the darkest elements of the human experience, never answering any questions, but presenting the feeling within them, it is a record that has the ability to grow with the listener, gaining more and more significance as life goes on. It's these moments and the feelings within them that make Brand New's The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me a special album. The danger of slipping between the crack poses a threat to your future. The chasm between dark and light grows vast. These events repeat themselves, and as they do, the questions and answers grow. Third break up, fifth death, a seemingly infinite amount of time spent doing drugs and falling asleep next to a pile of sick. But the big, raw feelings behind these inaugural events never go away. First kiss first break-up first time taking drugs or throwing up on floor of a train first death of a family member first extended stay away from home first argument that gets you kicked out of the house first reconciliation. Others are imbued with intense moments of grief, frustration, guilt and anger, but also the simultaneous outpouring of love that can accompany these feelings.Īs a teenager, adolescence seems like a conveyor belt of first-after-first-after-first. Be my breath, there's nothing I wouldn't give", he sings on another. ![]() "I'm not your friend, I'm not your lover, I'm not your family", Lacey screams on one song, the piercing sound of his voice echoing the lonely emptiness of that statement. ![]() In a way, The Devil and God is a literal purge a push to expel the sort of mature, yet dark feelings that continue to grow within us long after we let go of angst and become an adult, but also can't seem to shake extended flashes of harrowing despair. We'll never have to rot together underneath dirt." The result is eerie and haunting, closing with the lyric "We'll never have to buy adjacent plots of earth. Inspired by a local news report, he wrote "Limousine" about a 7-year-old girl who was killed by a drunk driver hours after serving as a flower girl in her aunt's wedding. Do I get the gold chariot or do I float through the ceiling?" sings Jesse Lacey on "Jesus Christ". I'm a little bit scared of what comes after. These themes are apparent across the album. Prior to writing the album, each band member faced illness and death in their family life. But The Devil and God is album that is literally born from the process of putting someone in the ground and leaving feelings underneath the soil and the never-ending search for respite that comes afterward. Most emo bands write about death through the lens of a teenager who has become bored with suburbia and wants a way out. But in these dark moments, it's also beautiful, as though it's strapped a nail gun to your head and pulled the trigger, only to let out a stream of light. It's like a freight train colliding into your ribcage at full speed. It's a rare album: one that asks us to look into the most damaging part of our soul, and often comes up with more questions than answers.įor a start, The Devil and God is one of the loudest records you'll ever hear. But I'm also convinced there's more to it than pushing the boundary of alternative music. It's a special record, one that is celebrated for being a watermark for mid-2000s emo, moving and advancing the genre far beyond anything that has come before or since, like Radiohead but for a different kind of sullen looking music fan. Yet, ten years later, on the month of its tenth anniversary, that moment and countless others on The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me continue to inform, confirm, and alleviate the darkest parts of who I am. At that point in life, the most angst-ridden pieces of music seemed to attach themselves to my body with the ease of a barnacle taking to a lonely, sad looking rock in the bottom of the ocean. I was fourteen years old at the time, the age where music becomes as much a part of your DNA as the nucleotides and the molecules and all the other biological parts that define who we are. ![]()
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