LAW

“I am on the mend,” Lacey insists on opening track Sowing Season. “At least now I can say that I am trying.”

They’re the words of a man whose understanding of God is preoccupied with merit. Standing in the rubble of a broken engagement, Lacey looks around and quotes Rudyard Kipling:

“Is it in you now to watch the things you gave your life to broken / And stoop and build them up with worn-out tools?”

Is there a better metaphor for the Law than a worn-out tool? Formerly functional, now powerless and nearly obsolete. Unable to deliver that which it seems to promise.

It wasn’t enough to save Lacey’s relationship with Sherri Dupree.

“I’m not your friend. I’m not your lover. I’m not your family,” he howls.

“No time to get the seeds into the cold ground / It takes some time to grow anything / Before you put my body in the cold ground / Take some time to warm it with your hands / Before it’s coming to an end.”

The love Lacey once had for the Law looms large on Millstone.

“I used to be such a burning example,” he laments. “I used to sleep without a single stir / ’cause I was about my Father’s work.”

Lacey’s confidence used to be in his devotion, his heart-felt passion. But the heart is fickle, and passions fade.

“I used to pray like God was listening / I used to make my parents proud … I used to know the name of every person I’d kissed / Now I’ve made this bed and I can’t fall asleep in it.”

Driven to desperation, Lacey invokes Luke 17:2:

“I’m my own stone around my neck / Be my breath — there’s nothing I wouldn’t give.”

It shouldn’t surprise that a song about self-destruction is followed immediately by a song called Jesus Christ, in which Lacey deals frankly with the Savior:

“Jesus Christ, I’m not scared to die / I’m a little bit scared of what comes after … do I divide, and pull apart? / ’Cause my bright is too slight to hold back all my dark.”

Impending judgment is always on the back of Lacey’s mind; he brings it to the forefront here:

“I know you’re coming in the night like a thief,” he says. “I know you’re coming for the people like me.”

Which people are those — the condemned, or the absolved?

Lacey’s anxiety over the coming judgment threatens to break him apart on Degausser. It’s keeping him awake: “Goodbye to sleep / I think this staying up is exactly what I need / Take apart your head.”

One of the more interesting Easter eggs in Brand New’s music is the subliminal spoken-word track underneath the choruses on Degausser. Beneath the second chorus, Lacey wonders what kind of God will greet him in death:

“ When I arrive will God be waiting and pacing around his throne? / Will he feel a little Old Testament? / And will he celebrate with fire and brimstone / I admit, I am afraid of the reckoning.”

Lacey knows there’s wrath stored up for him for what he’s done, and he doesn’t see a way out or a possibility of transformation:

“When we were made, we were set apart / If life is a test then I get bad marks / Now some saint got the job of writing down my sins / The storm is coming, the storm is coming in …. I can’t shake this little feeling I’ll never get anything right.”

The further you listen, the more measuring up to anyone’s standard beings to sound like an exercise in futility to Jesse Lacey, whether that standard is Sherri Dupree’s, or her father’s, or God’s, or Lacey’s own standard for himself.

On You Won’t Know Lacey writes to Dupree’s father directly:

“Hey Mr Hangman, go get your rope / Your daughters weren’t careful, I fear that I am a slippery slope / Now even if I lay my head down at night / After a day I got perfectly right / She won’t know.”

Later in the song he sings to Sherri herself:

“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 / And I can’t use the telephone / To tell you that I’m dead and gone / So you won’t know.”

The wreck that killed Katie Flynn

In an effort to convey the depth of his condemnation, Lacey employs a chilling metaphor on cornerstone track Limousine. It’s the true story of Katie Flynn, a seven-year-old girl from Lacey’s hometown of Long Island. After serving as the flower girl at a wedding, Katie and several family members left the wedding in a limousine, only to be hit head-on by a drunk driver who was driving the wrong way down the highway. Katie was decapitated. The drunk driver lived.

Lacey identifies himself with the drunk driver:

“A beauty supreme, yeah you were right about me / But can I get myself out from underneath this guilt that will crush me? / And in the choir I saw a sad messiah / He was bored and tired of my laments / Said ‘I died for you one time but never again.’”

When the Law crushes a man, it does so completely.