Daisy is a paradox made audible. Brand New’s fourth studio opus pulses with contradiction: tender yet violent, meticulous yet untamed, a howl caught in the throat of chaos. The band abandons the melodic melancholy of Deja Entendu and The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me, venturing into abrasive, jagged landscapes, yet beneath the surface lies an architecture of careful design – fire, the woods, disconnection, dissolution – all entwined in a meditation on destruction and renewal. The album is less a record than a ritual, a map of entropy inscribed in sound and symbol, demanding immersion.
The cover itself offers the first incantation. A lone deer stands frozen in a darkened clearing, illuminated by some unseen, unearthly light. Pastoral, yet unnerving; familiar, yet uncanny. The deer is a witness, neutral, indifferent, a silent observer of the chaos that courses through the album. In folklore, deer suggest innocence, vulnerability, sacrifice – but here, innocence is compromised, shadowed by menace. The woods loom behind it, a space where serenity and savagery collide, foreshadowing a journey into instability, the fragility of life, and the inevitability of destruction.
The woods, like the album itself, are liminal. They are neither sanctuary nor hell, but threshold: between civilization and wilderness, light and shadow, comprehension and abyss. They hold the terror of the unknown, the pressure of isolation, the allure of self-confrontation. “The silence in the woods is so loud,” the lyrics whisper; here, the natural world is neither ally nor adversary, merely a mirror reflecting our own internal chaos. Yet the woods also promise transformation. To enter them is to strip away artifice, to confront the rawness at the core of being, and emerge – perhaps wounded, perhaps enlightened.
Fire is Daisy’s recurring heartbeat. It consumes, it illuminates; it destroys and remakes. From the first cacophonous eruption of “Vices” to the anguished plea in “Sink” to be thrown into the flames, fire embodies both annihilation and purification. It is duality made elemental: the destructive force that clears space for new growth, the crucible in which identity and perception are both tested and reborn. To confront this fire is to confront one’s own impermanence, the transient nature of self, of love, of belief. Yet it is not despairing; in destruction lies agency, a chance to choose what burns, what endures, and what is made anew.
Daisy’s soundscape mirrors its thematic tension. The album opens with Reverend J. M. Gates, a hymn bleeding into the chaos of “Vices,” establishing the dissonance that will persist throughout: serenity colliding with turbulence, the sacred enveloped by the profane. Jesse Lacey’s vocals traverse extremes – anguished screams, mournful croons – mirroring the oscillation between agony and reflection. Instrumentation is raw, abrasive, intentionally frayed, as if the music itself is unraveling even as it is composed. Yet beneath this apparent disorder lies a deliberate architecture, guiding the listener through descent, confrontation, and a tenuous emergence.
Entropy courses through every track, yet entropy is not merely loss – it is transformation. The album’s recurring symbols – fire, woods, deer – form a lattice through which dissolution becomes beauty, chaos becomes meditation, disintegration becomes art. The final track, “Noro,” lingers with its haunting refrain, “I’m on my way out,” a suspended breath between despair and transcendence, an unresolved exit that reflects the album’s embrace of uncertainty as intrinsic to existence.
The deer, standing quietly amidst shadow and light, embodies the listener’s task: to witness, to inhabit the liminal, to recognize the interplay of destruction and renewal. Daisy is an enactment of its own meditation – a record that does not merely describe entropy but immerses the listener in its fire and woods, its uncertainty, its beauty. To engage with it is to confront impermanence, to feel the fragility of self, and to emerge – burned, perhaps, but alive – with the luminous knowledge that even in dissolution, there is vitality, and even in chaos, the possibility of rebirth.
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