Brand New: Science Fiction

BRAND NEW: SCIENCE FICTION (2017)

1) Lit Me Up; 2) Canʼt Get It Out; 3) Waste; 4) Could Never Be Heaven; 5) Same Logic / Teeth; 6) 137; 7) Out Of Mana; 8) In The Water; 9) Desert; 10) No Control; 11) 451; 12) Batter Up.

General verdict: Deadly dull third-rate alt-rockisms. If this is the way depression is pictured in rock music nowadays, thereʼs just no fun in depression any more.

The world seems to literally demand a punny joke out of you when you set out to review an album by a 17-year old band that still calls itself Brand New, doesnʼt it? You could probably find a cop out by saying that, since Brand New had not released a record since 2009, this is like a brand new beginning for them... except that the band broke up upon completing the sessions, and has openly stated that Science Fiction was intended to be their farewell gesture.

Perhaps it was this very statement that prompted all the positive reviews — because as far as I am concerned, this is just another Brand New record: not too bad, not too good, nothing particularly memorable or particularly horrendous. It sounds a little slower, a little more quiet, a little more dedicated to «subtle, suspenseful gloom» than «angsty, wailing gloom», which, I guess, is to be expected of a band that got eight more years behind its back and now wants to make an atmo­spheric exit with a wave of smooth chill. Unfortunately, the eight years in question have not made them into better songwriters, players, arrangers, or showmen.

Let me just explain my feelings by concentrating on the first and last tracks on the record — otherwise I feel like I might trip, slip, and do some permanent damage to my brain. ʽLit Me Upʼ begins with soft layers of electronic hum and a tape recording: "This tape recounts a dream which occurred close to the termination of approximately 400 hours of intensive individual therapy...", upon which the lady patient begins telling her dream — which is boring, in case you were hoping for some Vincent Price type of moment. Once the lethargic, emotionless narrative is over and the song itself begins, Science Fiction has lifted its curtain and established its vibe — a slow, gray, limp, atmospheric vibe that might be the right thing for you if you, too, have just terminated approximately 400 hours of intensive individual therapy. (Though Iʼd rather recommend ʽSunny Girlfriendʼ by The Monkees, rather than go on wallowing in your own pain). But the smooth hum of the smooth trip-hoppy bass and the dull-ringing sustained bluesy chords of the heavily treated electric guitars never go one inch beyond simple, monotonous ambience — and I cannot even tell how many times in my life I have already had to endure that crap, Just Because The Sincerely Inspired Artist Has To Convey The Dulling Of His Emotional Receptors By Making Music That Goes Absolutely Nowhere And Makes A Big Fucking Point Out Of It.

At the very least, if you are making a song like that, by all means do not accompany it with lyrics like "It lit me up like a torch on a pitch black night / Lit me up and I burn from the inside out / Yeah I burn like a witch in a Puritan town", because on paper this seems like something off a Def Leppard album — in practice it sounds like Robert Smith on sedatives after liposuction. And since we already know that Jesse Lacey has always had a hard time making his emotional pain believable, it would take a real good jolt to make ʽLit Me Upʼ change oneʼs biases. But there is no jolting here, just 400 hours of intensive individual therapy.

Fast forward many many many endless miles of routine depression — and meet ʽBatter Upʼ, a nine-minute long epic closer. Now you might expect something to happen over nine minutes of music, right? After the first two or three minutes of its endless acoustic loop, sonically pleasant but melodically every bit as original as a James Taylor song from the 1990s, it slowly began to dawn on me that this is going to end exactly the way that it started, and is not going to go any­where different in the middle — and I was almost right, except that the last couple of minutes consisted of yet more quiet humming noises. "Itʼs never going to stop / Batter up / Itʼs never going to stop / Batter up". (Since my baseball vocabulary is horrible, I had to actually look up ʽbatter upʼ in the dictionary. Still not sure that I understand completely what it means, but it did come to my attention that it is an anagram for ʽbutt-rapeʼ, and you know, that feels just about right at the moment).

In between ʽLit Me Upʼ and ʽBatter Upʼ ten more songs are stuck, and after three listens I do not remember a single one of them. I do remember that some sounded like third-rate REM and a few sounded like second-rate Pearl Jam; a couple featured annoying screaming vocals and a couple tried to rock out, but mostly it was just that slow bluesy grayness all over. Oh yeah, ʽ451ʼ sounded like a watered-down Black Keys song. Did I miss anything?

Yes, for the record, Science Fiction got generally positive reviews and is currently featured in RateYourMusicʼs Top 30 albums for 2017. All I can say is that if this kind of music is now held to be symbolic of rock in the late 2010s, then rock is not just dead, it is deeply submerged in embalming fluid, and Science Fiction is that fluid. I swear to God, one of the critics called this «the Abbey Road of emo» or something. I do not know all that much about emo, but if this analogy is even barely hinting at the truth, I shudder to think what the Please Please Me of emo could ever have sounded like.

Brand New: Daisy

BRAND NEW: DAISY (2009)

1) Vices; 2) Bed; 3) At The Bottom; 4) Gasoline; 5) You Stole; 6) Be Gone; 7) Sink; 8) Bought A Bride; 9) Daisy; 10) In A Jar; 11) Noro.

Eight years into their recording career, it is difficult to expect that a band like Brand New — who, by this time, should really start thinking about a name change — would be able to properly sur­prise their audiences. Most of the critics who agreed to discuss Daisy kinda sorta agreed that it was a «serious» effort, and that the band decided to explore darker and subtler topics, and that evil word «maturity» also made more than a single appearance, but you could also kinda sorta sense from the reviews that nobody was really stunned by this maturity. Because it is not as if Lacey or Accardi mastered any new skills here, or acquired any specific insight. They are still willing to experiment and look for new ways to express their irrational dissatisfaction with what­ever comes their way — that much is obvious. But they're still not geniuses. And they still have solid potential to annoy and irritate, rather than amaze and hypnotize.

Take the lead (and only) single, ʽAt The Bottomʼ. The word «bottom», unless you use it in a sexu­al sense (but then you use different prepositions), usually suggests the idea of desperation, being at the end of one's rope. How does the music agree with it? It never really gets more despe­rate than the somber bluesy electric guitar introduction — then the verse melody is really just this one nicely bent chord, which then explodes into a nice mess of slide guitar on the loud chorus, but how «bottom» is that? And how convincing are those vocals, trying once again to convey an aura of suffering and frustration — but failing, as far as I'm concerned, because the music is limp and the lyrics are just too twisted for their own good? "There's a lake / And at the bottom you will find my friends / They don't swim cause they're all dead / We never are what we intend or invent" — look, this is frickin' embarrassing, I'm just too old to pay serious attention to this shit. Where's old Jim Morrison when you really need him? At least he laid his pretentiousness right on the line, not trying to pseudo-invent his own philosophical system from hastily scrapped together pieces of existentialist broodings. Once Lacey writes something as cool as "I woke up this morning and I got myself a beer / The future's uncertain and the end is always near", please wake me up.

And it's not as if it's a bad song, really — I like the way how the guitar melody progresses from intro to verse to chorus, and I do find the chorus somewhat catchy, and I like that they do not re­sort to all-out screaming. The only thing I don't like, in fact, is that there are no traces of a guitar solo — something that could really help out here, but, well, you know, wishing for a guitar solo on an indie rock song is like wishing for a sex scene in a Disney movie. So, all in all, I should be kept happy here, and happily recommend the song to everybody. And yet — it just feels so in­adequate to the task. All these references to lake bottoms, darkness, little lies, drowning in floods, "drugs on a silver plate", they just feel pulled out of one's ass, set to feeble musical backing, and then packaged as Great Human Tragedy. And it doesn't exactly feel «fake» — like before, it feels confused. They're trying to get it out, but they don't know how.

Now let us take the second longest song on the album: ʽYou Stoleʼ, which, at six minutes running time, forms the central pillar of Daisy. It takes almost three minutes to build up to the (first) cli­max — and the guys should be congratulated for avoiding the usual trap, as all the lyrics are de­livered in a hushed, mourning tone, whereas the loud climax is purely instrumental (but even there they play a shrill double-tracked guitar riff rather than a solo!). But that long build-up peri­od — during most of that, they sound like a handicapped tribute band to British Sea Power, mimi­cking their love for depth, echoes, hush-hush, and mystery, but only possessing like half of that band's skill for instrumental overlays that actually provide the depth. Again, there is a semi-successful attempt at achieving something — but no bullseye.

Now let us go to something really pretentious and cryptic. ʽIn A Jarʼ has a guitar riff that sounds like it were, in fact, played from within a jar, with the lid screwed on so tightly it can barely let through a microphone cord. It also has a tricky time signature, with a slightly offbeat rhythm that confuses the senses. Then there are the words: "We live in a jar and think the lid's the sky" (what is this, a rerun of The Truman Show?), "you're hoping for a savior on your cross outside" (outside the jar? is it you or the savior that is outside? I'm sort of confused with these pronouns here), "stars are just a million little fireflies" (nice simile, but hardly original), "the sun is just a hole, it's the light outside" (have they been reading too much Einstein?). Then, unfortunately, there's some screaming in the chorus, but you also get the major decoding clue: "No one saves me cause I'm sinking slowly!". Then you're supposed to go mad with desperation and really feel for the guy, and for the whole universe, because your eyes have just been opened to the meaninglessness and pointlessness of it all.

Okay, honestly, I know that silly sarcasm can be used as a weapon against anything and anybody, so you are perfectly entitled to seeing this as a series of cheap shots. What is expensive, though, is the actual feelings I get when listening to this stuff — and they are almost surprisingly neutral. Once again, Brand New just... deliver. Deliver a piece of product that makes me respect them for their efforts, but does not make me love them for the success of these efforts. As long as Lacey does not scream (and, unfortunately, he does that quite a bit on many of the other songs), Daisy is perfectly listenable. It is even meaningful — it sweats and struggles a lot to intellectualize its emotions and emotionalize its intellect. But it just feels way too much like the presupposition is "We suffer" and the rest is a desperate search for the answer to the question "Why exactly is it that we are suffering?", when it actually should feel the other way around — "something is not right", and then "we suffer because something is not right". And this is why, no matter how much I try, I just cannot relate to this album and its alleged complexity.

I guess I will just finish this with another bloody comparison: every time I hear Lacey proclaim that "I'm on my way to hell" in the closing number, I close my eyes and just hum the chorus to AC/DC's ʽHighway To Hellʼ, and think that, well, whaddaya know, so many people on their way to hell, and each of them has his own attitude about that, and even if in my own life I would pro­bably be closer to Lacey's personality than to Bon Scott's, in this particular case I'd rather relate to Bon's attitude than Lacey's. Take my word for it — if you're really on your way to hell, don't bo­ther about puffing and huffing and aggrandizing yourself about it. In the end, that's just vanity, and dressing it up in superficial complexity and cryptic verbalizing won't make it into something else — certainly not into genuine, convincing, empathetic suffering.

Brand New: The Devil And God Are Raging Inside Me

BRAND NEW: THE DEVIL AND GOD ARE RAGING INSIDE ME (2006)

1) Sowing Season (Yeah); 2) Millstone; 3) Jesus Christ; 4) Degausser; 5) Limousine; 6) You Won't Know; 7) Wel­come To Bangkok; 8) Not The Sun; 9) Luca; 10) Untitled; 11) Archers; 12) Handcuffs.

Emotional pain. It's actually a real thing, and most of us have probably experienced it — but the more I listen to 21st century music that got critical acclaim for allegedly bottling and conveying waves of emotional pain to the appreciative audience, the more I get the feeling — and yes, may­be I am alone on this, but I don't care — the feeling that somehow, at some elusive moment in time, musicians have simply lost the ability to express their emotional pain in music in a convin­cing manner. Horribly, it even leads me to suspect that they might have lost the ability to feel emotional pain like a perfectly ordinary, reasonable, sensitive human being could feel emotional pain. Is it stupid on my part? George Harrison, Roger Waters, Robert Smith, Michael Stipe, Aimee Mann, Beth Gibbons — they feel and convey emotional pain. But I have not yet felt a single properly bleeding heart from anyone whose musical career would be separated by more than two thousand years from the alleged birth of the greatest emotional sufferer of 'em all (did that sound grossly pathetic? I thought it sounded grossly pathetic).

Case study: The Devil And God Are Raging Inside Me, a pretentious title that suggests bracing yourself as you push play — surely, with a statement like this, you can expect to be propelled head forward into the scary turbulence of the Greatest Emotional Drama ever. The light and the dark! The sin and the redemption! The suffering and the deliverance! The crime and the punish­ment! Jesse Lacey has grown up, matured, became initiated into the real serious issues of this world, and this is his take on the grim plight of the human race. The stakes are higher than ever before, and please expect a complete refund if you do not walk away from this experience a deep­ly changed man, with your whole life to rethink and brand new goals and promises to be made.

Unquestionably, in terms of overall development this album rises high above Your Favorite Weapon, and corrects some of the problems of Déjà Entendu. It is occasionally intriguing, far from always predictable, and sufficiently restrained in that the band does not come across as a bunch of annoying poseurs when you are forced to inhale their tragic psychologism. But the main issue remains the same: they just do not know. That is, according to my perspective: you will, of course, find plenty of dissenting opinions on how they totally blew the mind of some listener or other. I just wonder, in each such case, where and how exactly our emotional receptors have par­ted ways — finding it unimaginable that one could, for instance, experience the same kind of strong, heartfelt response for this album as one could for, say, The Cure's Disintegration.

So let us take a look at the singles first. ʽSowing Season (Yeah)ʼ, opening with a rather tedious minute-long section of overlapping phone chat recordings, is a nicely constructed alt-rock track that teaches us about the difficulties of building your life anew after it had been blown to pieces by some unimaginably horrific experiences. But the fact that Jesse Lacey did not, in fact, have all his relatives killed off in World War Two does not bother me as much as the fact that the transi­tion from the quiet verse section into the bombastic-climactic chorus simply does not have the (obviously intended) cathartic effect. The guitar riff that dominates the chorus is well constructed, but it is more math-rockish than emotionally involving, and the «wild» "yeah yeah"s that accom­pany it are puny and superficial compared to, say, Kurt Cobain's — now there was a guy who could crack a good "yeaaaaah" in such a way that you'd want to quickly call 911 to his place. La­cey's "yeah"s, on the other hand, can't help implying that... well, he'll get over it eventually.

The second single was ʽJesus Christʼ — and, well, even with atheism on a steady rise everywhere, you'd still want to think that choosing such a title imposes certain artistic obligations. And it is actually a good song — until they start to scream, that is. The little ringing guitar pattern, unori­ginal as it is, can mesmerize you a little with its steadiness, and the quiet atmosphere of the music goes very well with Jesse's tense, confessional singing, and there is a pretty restrained guitar solo, and the lyrics, dealing with insanity, death, and the afterlife, are intelligent... but then they just can't handle that crescendo — they just begin to scream, and it gets ugly without getting scary, and by the time they chant "we all got wood and nails and we turn out hate in factories", I have stopped being interested in the song. So sad, it started out so well.

On the non-singles material, they sometimes do better: top prize here goes to the nearly eight-minute epic ʽLimousineʼ, where the much lengthier crescendo fortunately succeeds — after a few rather mediocre minutes, they grasp a good groove, settle into a nice melancholic tonality, and work it out by adding layer after layer of guitars, keyboards, and even strings, rather than simply resorting to more of that ugly screaming. The "I love you so much / But do me a favor, baby, don't reply" bit and its development shows that they are at least randomly capable of gold mining, because there is romanticism here and tragedy and determination, regardless of whatever the actual message might be (actually, the song is about the accidental murder of a 7-year girl by a drunk driver), and plenty of subtlety and accuracy and thoroughness of arrangement. If it weren't for moments like these, the tables would have turned completely against the band — but the likes of ʽLimousineʼ show that they do have to be taken seriously, and that they do mature further and further with each new record. And that makes the numerous flaws of Devil And God even more infuriating against this background.

The hooky numbers, for instance, still tend to be spoiled by overemoting: thus, ʽNot The Sunʼ is designed as a somewhat «apocalyptic» rocker (its spirited intro, echoey produc­tion, and overall tone remind me, for some reason, of Hendrix's ʽAll Along The Watchtowerʼ) and even has some excellent guitar parts and a frantically tight rhythm section, but there's just too much emphasis on screaming again — an area in which Lacey is rarely convincing. ʽDegausserʼ sounds like a bad parody on Arcade Fire, replete with droning guitars, anthemic, but lackluster choir vocals, and soul­ful echoes — until the screaming comes in and drowns out all the associations in head-split­ting, but still boring loudness. And so on, and on, and on.

Honestly speaking, I would really like to love this album. At least, unlike quite a few other lazy hipsters who think that an understanding of «soul» excuses you from understanding the obsolete notion of «work», these guys are clearly trying — exploring many more types of textures here than they used to, writing complex lyrics that tend to avoid clichés, even displaying a healthy penchant for self-irony ("You're shouting so loud, you barely joyous broken thing / You're a voice that never sings" must be a self-reference, right?). It's just that almost everywhere they stop just one or two important steps away from greatness. Why not flesh out the hooks more? Why not work out the guitar figures better? Why not refrain from screaming in favor of a more subtle ap­proach (especially if they are capable of subtlety)? Is it because they are unable to have feelings that can be transposed to such kinds of hooks, or do they just not know how to transpose?

In the end, no matter how much I listen, the only thing that stays with me is the repetitive, mildly hypnotizing coda to ʽLimousineʼ, and I have but to constatate that the ambitiousness, although it does not destroy the record as a whole, does not pay off. I cannot agree that the Devil and God are raging anywhere inside this album — at best, they may have sent a couple of their lesser de­puties. Nice level of cultural erudition, but that's hardly sufficient foundation for an emotional masterpiece. Then again, who knows, maybe it's just my grumpy bias speaking up.

Brand New: Deja Entendu

BRAND NEW: DEJA ENTENDU (2003)

1) Tautou; 2) Sic Transit Gloria... Glory Fades; 3) I Will Play My Game Beneath The Spin Light; 4) Okay I Believe You, But My Tommy Gun Don't; 5) The Quiet Things That No One Ever Knows; 6) The Boy Who Blocked His Own Shot; 7) Jaws Theme Swimming; 8) Me Vs. Maradona Vs. Elvis; 9) Guernica; 10) Good To Know That If I Ever Need Attention All I Have To Do Is Die; 11) Play Crack The Sky.

Already these guys are getting more serious, and I am not sure if they deserve such an enthusias­tic pat on the back for this as they did. Yes, it is hard not to notice that on their second album, Brand New have moved way, way beyond writing about break-ups and are now writing about... well, about whatever they might have caught on TV the day before going into the studio, be it an Audrey Tautou movie or a Wes Anderson movie or a documentary about the shipwreck of the FV Pelican way back in 1951 — all of these subjects and more get faithfully covered on the record, and this, I guess, makes it more mature and makes their «emo» more substantial.

Unfortunately, the songwriting does not get improved all by itself just because the covered topics get more serious (or do they?). The lead single was ʽThe Quiet Things That No One Ever Knowsʼ, a song about strained relationships (maybe; if you're not sure what any song is about, write «strained relationships» and you have a 70% probability of getting it right) with lots of metapho­rical hospitals-and-blood imagery (and an appropriate video) but also with a very generic alt-rock melody that mostly rests either on power chords or on metronomically chugging guitars — and plenty of screaming, of course (not very quiet). I guess it is still much better than the average generic emo song — this one at least seems meticulously thought over — but no pop genius is in evidence, and the chorus just sucks.

The second single was ʽSic Transit Gloria...ʼ, and it at least has a cool-walking bassline that might remind you of ʽThe Guns Of Brixtonʼ, but the screamy chorus still ends up ruining it. Again I have no idea what the lyrics are about (seems to be at least partially about sex, which covers the 29,99% ground of the remaining probabilities), but I totally feel that the verses, where the vocals are «side-tracked» to the left and to the right of the cool-walking bassline and set up at least some sort of tense mood, deserve a much better, or at least more subtle chorus. As it is, it is hard to get moved when they start raving without any visible reasons whatsoever.

Amazingly, the best song on the album is also its longest — with this predictable formula of hookless guitar pop and meaningless screaming so firmly in place, you wouldn't think that Brand New could be at their best when trying to craft a lengthy epic, but they are: ʽGood To Know That If I Ever Need Attention, All I Have To Do Is Dieʼ is not only a funny title, but it also has a loud power pop rather than «screamo» chorus, and a couple of lengthy instrumental passages where Vincent Accardi shows off some nice chops (as well as a ʽHotel Californiaʼ fetish). I feel like most reviewers give up way before the end, so the song rarely, if ever, gets a mention, but it is the most interesting composition on this tiresome record — certainly better than whenever they break out the acoustic guitars and begin to sound like R.E.M. on speed (ʽPlay Crack The Skyʼ).

I know it's just the regular emo formula and all, but the music here is largely generic, and so is Jesse's singing — even with a formula in place, one could hope for more involving guitar riffs or catchier choruses. As it is, I doubt that Déjà Entendu, although it achieved some commercial success and got all those positive reviews, will ever get past the original adoration of those young adolescents with which these songs resonated in 2003, just because those guys were young and fresh as well. I find this record just as devoid of musical interest as its predecessor, but more pretentious, so a thumbs down is the proper way to go about this.

Brand New: Your Favorite Weapon

BRAND NEW: YOUR FAVORITE WEAPON (2001)

1) The Shower Scene; 2) Jude Law And A Semester Abroad; 3) Sudden Death In Carolina; 4) Mix Tape; 5) Failure By Design; 6) Last Chance To Lose Your Keys; 7) Logan To Government Center; 8) The No Seatbelt Song; 9) Seventy Times 7; 10) Secondary; 11) Magazines; 12) Soco Amaretto Lime.

Time for a little bit of emo, of which Brand New are the front line representatives in the New England area: Jesse Lacey on vocals and rhythm guitar, Vincent Accardi on lead guitar, Garrett Tierney on bass, and Brian Lace on drums — everything very concise and economical. This debut album was released on the Triple Crown label and, apparently, did not chart at all, but it helped them establish a footing, and even though it is usually dismissed as a «stepping stone» to success, it is not really that different from everything they'd do afterwards.

The angle under which this song collection could be discussed best, as far as my perspective is concerned, is «why the hell don't I hate this?» Because, really, the potential of this material to annoy and irritate is glaringly obvious. The songwriting is shoddy, with generic indie-rock riffs all over the place and the «quiet verse / loud chorus» opposition serving as the basis for most of the hooks. The lyrical and emotional themes of the songs concern breakups, breakups, and still more breakups, regardless of the song titles (yes, even a song called ʽLogan To Government Cen­terʼ is about a breakup — the title just metaphorically refers to a highway exit near Boston). The vocals are screechy, and neither the main nor the auxiliary guy have any individual manner of singing that would set them apart from college rockers all over the world.

But on the positive side, there is at the same time a tightness and a lightness to these tunes that makes these guys tolerable, and at times even likeable. As a band, they are very well coordinated; the drummer is smooth and flexible, the guitarists lock into each other with perfect precision, and they merge together pop structures and punk simplicity in a very professional fashion (they cer­tainly know their skill way beyond three chords, but this does not prevent them from a speedy and aggressive sound whenever they feel like it). Even more importantly, there is a whiffy sense of humor and a touch of intelligence behind the tunes — the songs are neither too whiny nor too foul-mouthed. It's almost as if they had a plan, to try and take this most boring of subjects (col­lege boy meets college girl, shit happens, college boy dumps college girl or vice versa) and see if they can present it in a way that does not annoy the hell out of demanding listeners. It doesn't always work, but they manage to do it while avoiding many of the usual clichés.

The thing is, the lyrics on their own look pretty darn bad ("so don't apologize, I hope you choke and die, search your cell for something with which to hang yourself" is not an atypical example), but they are delivered with a slightly ironic twist: this nervous nerdy character that Lacey por­traits in most of the songs sounds like a half-sincere idiot, half-clown who feeds on nervous tension but never truly suffers from suicidal (or even girlfriend-cidal) tendencies. On ʽMix Tapeʼ, he drops an almost jokey self-reference ("And I'm sick of your tattoos, and the way you don't appreciate Brand New... and me!"); on ʽSecondaryʼ, full of lyrical references to self-mutilation and suicide, he sings about all that stuff as if it were just an obligatory teenage ritual — all too often, it seems like a parody on teen angst, and it could well have been intentional.

Not that it saves the album from being forgettable: melody-wise, the songs have little to dis­tinguish themselves from millions of equally faceless pop-punk chord sequences. But the sense of sarcasm is refreshing, particularly on the last track, ʽSoco Amaretto Limeʼ, a semi-drunk acoustic anthem proclaiming that "I'm gonna stay eighteen forever" (hear that, Alice Cooper?), "we're the coolest kids and we take what we can get", and, finally, "you're just jealous cause we're young and in love" — all in perfect irony, of course. This is the best possible course: instead of puffing and huffing and showing off the overblown «tragic sincerity» of hormonal outbursts, lighten up and concentrate on the «fun» aspect of failed relationships, if at all possible. No thumbs up, but I expected so much worse that thumbing this down would feel unjust — even if everybody around seems to agree that the band got much better after this record (where I would quibble with the word «much», but that's just me).