Brand New – Deja Entendu

The people that say that Emo music of the naughties is absolute toss, definitely have never listened to Brand New or their album Deja Entendu.

Forget the stereotypical screaming and young adults in watered down goth costumes. Because thats not what you get with Brand New's Deja Entendu, this is a masterpiece of lyrics and music - and is a well needed addition to the Emo scene. Yes the songs are about love and romance, so if you don't like that stuff stop here, and leave. If you are wanting to give the style a second chance then please, continue.

Of course, i was one of those people. Emo equals My Chemical Romance which therefore equals 'oh gawd no not eeemoo music, thats crap'. Then again this was before i had even heard of Brand New. Now in this day and age when lyrics seem more like poems written by C grade English students (look at the Top 40 if you don't understand) Jesse Lacey's words are a much needed breath of fresh air - so fresh actually you will have to listen to this album more than once to actually believe how good the lyrics are here. And thanks to this album I now have two favourite songwriters, Max Bemis from Say Anything and, now, Jesse Lacey from Brand New - purely because they don't write songs, they write poetry - and trust me, i know what that is (thanks to the current GCSE English curriculum). To back up my statement of how great his (Jesse) song writing is read the lyrics to Sic Transit Gloria....Glory Fades - a song about sex, where the guy is under pressure - not the girl; written so well it doesn't even reference sex directly - in other words it doesn't contain the word sex or any of its many other forms.

Now i am over expressing my love for the lyrics, time to move onto the music. I listened to this album with my finger on the stop button ready, purely because the last Emo album i listened throughout was The Used's self-titled debut, which i hated - purely because i dislike the whole 'hi im a singer and all i do is scream'. Well i was glad that there are next to none screaming in here, with the odd strained line to emphasise the pain the character in the song feels. The music is good enough for an album like this, because the main intention here (which is evident) are the words not the music - so all the music really does is give the words backing.

As i love this album so much, i can't really single out a song, but if i had to then start with the single hit Sic Transit Gloria....Glory Fades - purely because this is the one most people like.