Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun

The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me

1) Brand New, The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me (2006)

After a month and a half of this endeavor, you might have come to the conclusion that there’s a lot of crap on this list. I love every album on the list dearly, but I’m self-aware enough to admit that I wouldn’t go to a wine and cheese party and try to wax philosophic about the subtler nuances of Taking Back Sunday.

As I said in this week’s vital interpolation, and this should have come as a surprise to no one, taste in music is subjective. And so while I chafe slightly at the judgment of sundry music snobs looking down their nose at the music I like, it usually rolls of my back quickly when I realize that everyone likes crap in some form or other, including the snobs. I try to avoid proclaiming that the stuff I like is any better or worse than the stuff you like, because really, who are any of us to judge?

All of this is to say, were I to find myself at a wine and cheese party and someone broached the topic of the best albums of the Zeroes, I would probably wait around patiently, noshing on my smoked gouda-on-a-table-water-cracker before politely interjecting, “Yes, This Is It was a very good album, but did you listen to The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me?”

Devil and God puts me in mind of the great paradox that we all find ourselves in w/r/t our favorite bands. On the one hand, there’s a reason you love them, so you want to hear the same, consistent sound. Of course, the band that stays consistent opens itself to accusations of being a one-trick pony, a trite and hackneyed joke. On the other hand, we like our bands to grow and develop. But if a band strays too much from the winning formula, well, “howling fantods” isn’t a strong enough term to describe our reaction. (I can’t count how many different people listed “old Blink-182″ as a favorite band in their AIM profile after Enema of the State came out.) So, in review, we want our bands to keep the same sound that made us fall in love with them, but also to develop and advance musically. Got it?

I think this desire for our favorite bands to grow (if it’s not something I completely invented) is kind of like a security blanket. We get to cling to the bands of our youth, but it’s not pathetic, because look, they’re actually a better band than they were when I started listening to them. If our bands don’t grow with us, it’s like a betrayal. We’re forced to look into the eyes of our own mortality and admit that there are some things that have to be left in the toybox. Take it from me: I just spent a month littering the tubes with however many words about emo records from eight years ago.

When Devil and God came out at the end of 2006, Brand New fans were almost at the end of their ropes. It had been more than three years since the release of their sophomore effort, the excellent Deja Entendu. Which would be fine, were it not for the band’s notoriously reclusive nature. There were no dates, no news, no nothing until early 2006, when nine untitled demos recorded for the new album leaked onto the Internet. (Incidentally, shortly thereafter I found myself sitting at a bar in Providence, Rhode Island, after the first show Brand New had played in almost two years, with lead guitarist Vin Accardi. [This is like, the only name-dropping story I have, so please indulge me. And Linda, please corroborate this in comments.] He said that one of the tech guys in the studio had had those demos [which took on the moniker Fight Off Your Demons, after the band's new URL, and is a pretty damn good album in its own right] on an iPod, which he proceeded to accidentally leave in a pizza parlor, where it was somehow picked up by some enterprising fan who proceeded to put them on the Internet. It seemed like a far-fetched story, to say the least.)

Long story short, Brand New’s third album was much-anticipated, and I bought it the minute it came out. I can’t lie: I was underwhelmed! It was too dark. It was too much of a departure from the band’s emo roots. I took to heart criticisms like those leveled in Rolling Stone’s dismissal of the album: “But the selling—and sticking—point is still dark drama, with shadowy, shimmery textures, agonized choruses and frontman Jesse Lacey yowling away and dropping ponderous poetry like a guy with his heart on his sleeve and a couple of philosophy books on his shelf.” I had the reaction of a self-loathing pop punk fan: it was inconceivable that an emo band I liked could produce a serious piece of art.

I’ve been beating this quote into the ground, but it’s always been true: the songs you grow to like never stick at first. The more I listened, the more every track grew on me, to the point where I would just listen to the whole thing all the way through. That’s right: there’s no skippable song. Not only was the music masterful; that could have been expected, based on the leap Brand New made between Your Favorite Weapon and Deja Entendu. Not only were the words poetry; Jesse Lacey is a crafter of lyrical miracles. No one disputes this. I guess I just wasn’t prepared to encounter an actual thought-provoking album, where I would find myself thinking about the songs long after I stopped listening. Is it so bad for a songwriter to have his “heart on his sleeve and a couple of philosophy books on his shelf”? That’s a couple more philosophy books than most people have!

So, what happens when an emo band grows up? They find God, in a manner of speaking. (You couldn’t tell from the title of the album?) Yes, Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun’s favorite album of the decade is also the most existentially dreadful one on the list. It’s refreshing, in its way. I understand that not a lot of people are going to the Billboard charts for their theology, but on the other end, there’s not a whole lot of critical thought regarding religion going on in popular music these days. It’s like Kanye says: “They say you can rap about anything except for Jesus. / That means guns, sex, lies, video tapes, / But if I talk about God my record won’t get played.”

I won’t dissect entire album’s various religious messages, just what I think is the main one: redemption, and its possibility or lack thereof. In the second track, “Millstone” (that’s an allusion to Mark 9:42, for those scoring at home: “And if anyone causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to be thrown into the sea with a large millstone tied around his neck”), we get the first seed of doubt: “I used to pray like God was listening,” Lacey laments, before a uh, fine point is put on things in “Jesus.” The song is one side of a conversation between our protagonist and Our Lord and Savior himself, asking all the usual questions: “Well Jesus Christ I’m alone again. / So what did you do those three days you were dead? / ‘Cause this problem’s gonna last more than the weekend. / Well Jesus Christ I’m not scared to die. / I’m a little bit scared of what comes after: / Do I get the gold chariot? / Do I float through the ceiling? / Do I divide and pull apart?”

At the end, we get to Lacey’s view of the relationship between Christ and ourselves: “And I know you think that I’m someone you can trust, / But I’m scared I’ll get scared / And I swear I’ll try to nail you back up . . . / But we’ve all got wood and nails. / We don’t turn out hate in factories.” Say what you will about how crummy Christianity has been and continues to be, but I think we can all agree that Jesus was a pretty righteous dude. To imply that after 2,000 odd years, we would still be compelled to fear and punish that kind of goodness, and further, that the spark of hatred and violence doesn’t come from the outside, but rather burns in every man’s heart, says a lot about Jesse Lacey’s low opinion of humanity in general. Is he right? Do each of us have wood and nails?

Clearly, mankind is still in need of redemption, but you won’t find a ton of it in The Devil and God. (To wit, in “You Won’t Know,” for instance, we learn that “They say in Heaven there’s no husbands and wives. / On the day that I show up they’ll be completely out of their forgiveness supplies.” Oh well, right?) Fortunately, we hear from JC himself later on in the album, which leads me to my

Signature track: Limousine

“Limousine” is a song about a young girl named Katie Flynn who was killed in a drunk driving accident on Long Island in 2005. It’s a terrible enough story, some of the details of which are recounted here, to inspire a complete stranger to write a haunting, powerful song about it. There’s an interpretation of “Limousine,” which I’ll run with here, that says the song features the voices of the three principles in Katie’s story. The first long, chant-like portion of the song is supposed to be her mother. The second, a prayer from her killer. And finally, Katie speaks in the muted portion behind the frenetic climax of “Limousine,” reflecting on the life she’ll never get to actually live: “I’ll never have to buy adjacent plots of earth. / We’ll never have to rot together underneath the earth. / I’ll never have to lose my baby in the crowd. / I should be laughing right now.”

(I encourage you to watch the band play this song live. That link is from a show I actually went to a few months ago. It’s eerie and moving stuff, and probably the closest thing I’ve seen to a collective spiritual experience at a rock show.)

I’m most concerned with that middle part, though: “Dear Beauty Supreme, / Yeah you were right about me. / But can I get myself back from underneath this guilt that will crush me? / And in the choir I saw our sad messiah. / He was bored and tired of my laments. / Said, ‘I’d die for you one time but never again.’” Never again. Ouch. A lot of us consider God or Jesus or whoever as an all-forgiving, all-redeeming presence, and there are certainly arguments for that way of thinking. Taken rationally, though (and I know that’s a lot to ask of religion [I don't mean that as a dig!]), the question Lacey is asking here is, what more can we ask of Christ? If dying for us isn’t enough to get humanity on the right track, what else is there that a savior can do? Of course, it’s catechismical common sense that the whole redemption thing is a two-way street: God will take care of you if you do your part. Lacey takes a bit of a more pessimistic position: if you were hoping for a higher power to look out for you, you might be out of luck.

At first blush, this is a tremendous downer. And I’ll offer my amateur, theological know-nothing interpretation of Jesse Lacey’s lyrics, but I won’t speak for whatever kind of faith the man has in his heart. He may very well believe that there’s no hope for us at all, and considering that the types of tragedies that took the life of Katie Flynn are happening every day all over the world, it’s understandable that he would think that’s the case. I take a more affirmative message from “Limousine,” and from the whole album in general. I sort of kind of addressed this issue back in the day on this blog’s earlier iteration, w/r/t Barack Obama’s election, and the perfectibility of our union, but there’s a message there that applies to the conduct of our lives in general: “Thou mayest rule over sin.” Or thou mayest not. It’s up to you. If God isn’t listening, and if Christ died for us one time but never again, then that means that if we’re to be redeemed, we’re going to have to do it ourselves. Making ourselves, and our world, better is our own responsibility, and no one else’s. And if it turns out that God is there, we’ll have done right by him. Feather on.