Review Summary: With Daisy, Brand New's penultimate release, they take all the melody out of the music leaving only the agony of The Devil and God. That forest burned, indeed.
Some albums are just not meant to get made. When you listen to Daisy, I recommend listening to it right after their previous effort, A Devil and God. Sure the lyrics of Devil and God were awful but at least it had some kicking melodies to fall back upon while listening. Daisy has not anything like that, it is just an empty hole of screaming and loud screechy guitars, and honestly I fail to see the point. Jesse Lacey's baffling decisiveness to go into this direction confused a lot of fans when it first came out, none more than me, though. Starting with the song Vices this song starts out with a weird wimpy 80s song before kicking you in the nuts with some hardcore punk goodness. This is the coolest song on the album because the formula hasn't had time to get boring yet, and all the screaming and screeching guitars still sound cool. Unfortunately this is where the coolness ends, as Bed is one of the most mind numbingly bad songs I've ever heard.
Speaking of Bed, this album has the worst lyrics I've ever herd in my entire life. "Laid her on the bed, laid her on the bed, laid her on the bed" Jesse chants with no real decisiveness in his words. He just meanders all over the place, never getting to a real point. Like on At the Bottom, the next track. That track is supposedly supposed to be about dead friends (perhaps the same ones that sank in the awful song Luca) but the story in the song never really concludes. We needed an outro that finished the lyrics, not just the chorus repeating like four times at the end of the song. But nothing tops the awfulness of You Stole. It's like its trying to be a soft rock song but it can't help but be really weird. Listen to the guitar line in the song; is that mess even in a key? Yeah the key of awful (sorry for that joke too). Other than that it's probably one of the better written songs lyrically. "If I'm a liar and you're a thief at least be both know when the other one sleeps" is a great line, good work on Jesse's part on this song.
The end of the album is where it starts to get a little better, but only slightly. Bought a Bride has that cool bridge part about the traintracks, and the way the drums shift in that part actually sounds really cool. The self-titled song Daisy would actually be a pretty good song if it wasn't for the crazy bass drops in the second verse, can you say overproduction? The first half of the song is an enjoyable ballad (even if it does have stupid samples like every other hardcore band in the world) but the second half gets ruined. The only other song I want to talk about is Noro the finale. And the only reason I mention it is because it's really creepy, so creepy that it almost gives Luca a running for scariest Brand New song. Overall this album isn't very good but it has a couple of good songs in it. Musically this one is less than Devil and God but somehow the lyrics managed to be even worse on this outing. I'd avoid this one at all costs unless you desperately need something to make fun of ironically.
