Review Summary: Brand New's 4th album is indeed their worst, but I still like it.
Seeing as the other Brand New albums all had fantastically written reviews that bleed as much heart into the writing as the band does, I decided to review the album that split fan base down the middle. Daisy. Although Daisy is both lyrically and musically different from The Devil and God are raging inside me, It's still very obvious this Is Brand New, well that is until you hear the opening track Vices.
And so we start here, with the song that made me hate this album a lot more than I should have for a long time. Vices is not a bad song, it's the intro to the song, the audio clip, that just always annoys me. I mean just why? And that is a question that will continue over the course of the album such as:
"Why is Jesse Lacey's writing less personal and more vague than normal?"
"Why does everything have a western feel?"
"Why Is Be Gone even on the album?"
But for all the gripes I have with Daisy, it's a good album, not their best by any means but still good. Daisy is an album you will either immediately hate upon first listen or love, for me it was a bit more complicated. It grew on me, I really like a lot of the songs on here, and the cool out of nowhere moments, like the awesome guitar solo on "You Stole" the abrupt end and perfect transition of "Vices" to "Bed" The very weird dark lyrics that I suspect can only really have meaning to the band.
The instrumentation on this album is erratic, sometimes it can just stay pretty mellow the whole time otherwise it's explosive or building to an explosion. Vincent wrote a majority of the lyrics this time, and Jesse co-wrote and wrote some, but it's not always obvious to see who wrote what, but it really doesn't matter. The vocals of Jesse as always fit Brand New perfectly and he can still scream with the best of them.
Daisy is just a hard album to talk about, because I don't hate Daisy I just don't love Daisy like I do the other albums. I like daisy. It's a good album, really good, but it doesn't really have much of a theme or mood like the other albums do. Daisy feels more like a collection of random songs than an actual cohesive album with flow, oh, and flow, that's really something that Daisy doesn't have. Like at all. It just kinda jumps all over the place.
Daisy is like Brand New threw The Devil and God in a blender and let it sit out a little too long so they put it in the fridge in hopes to make it fresh again and only mildly succeeding, Brand New does their best to pull out every trick they have to grab my attention and I'm just sitting here and realizing I've heard it all before, but it's like a movie on late night cable, sure you've seen it all before but it's fun to take a trip down memory lane every now and then.
