The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me (Brand New, 2006) Review
The last thing you'll realize you need is what you've already got.
I first listened to The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me (hereafter abbreviated as TDAGARIM) back in 2017. I didn’t pay attention to the lyrics, and musically speaking, it didn’t impress me enough to listen to it again anytime soon, except for a few individual tracks like “Sowing Season (Yeah)” and “Welcome to Bangkok”. I found its flow rather uneven and not cohesive at all, as I couldn’t see the relationship between such sonically dissonant tracks as “Millstone” and “Handcuffs” or “Degausser” and “Jesus”. I gave it another spin in 2018, which seemed to reaffirm my first impression of the album, because it wasn’t until 2022 that I gave it another chance. But this time it was different. So different that I can only express it through my last.fm scrobbles:
The album was the same, but my 2017/2018 self wasn’t the same as my 2022 self. We know that a person’s circumstances change significantly over the course of 5 years, but consider how much mine changed to the point where I found comfort in an album about a man who turned to music to ease his pain. Despite Jesse Lacey’s disclaimer in the song “Sowing Season (Yeah)” that he’s not our friend, I felt understood and found relief for some of my pain through his lyrics.
I am not your friend
I am just a man who knows how to feel
I am not your friend
I’m not your lover, I’m not your family
What at first seemed to be a disjointed combination of emotions and sounds turned out to be different approaches to expressing the same feeling: loss. TDAGARIM deals with it from multiple angles, ranging from raw energy and anger-filled songs like “Degausser”, “You Won’t Know” and “Sowing Season (Yeah)” to more emotional and calmer tracks that gradually build up to climactic emotional explosions like “Limousine” and “Luca”. Within the broad theme of loss, the common denominator of the album is the loss of faith, best illustrated in the song “Jesus”, where Jesse speaks directly to Jesus Christ to confess that he fears his deeds can’t be forgiven even by a deity as great as Him.
Relationship failures are also a fundamental aspect that he explores in “Degausser” and “You Won’t Know”. I’ll elaborate on this later, but ever since Jesse was accused of sexual misconduct1, some lyrics now read differently with the turn of events.
Your daughters weren't careful
I fear that I'm a slippery slope
There is also the loss of self, especially developed in “Millstone”, where he reveals that he used to be such a burning example that eventually ended up in a miserable state, to the point of not recognizing himself anymore, which is also touched on in the song “Same Logic/Teeth” from Brand New’s Science Fiction (2017).
Following the secular motif and recurring biblical references throughout the album, Jesse also tells of being punished for his sins in the following line of the chorus:
I’m my own stone around my neck
Which is a direct reference to Matthew 18:6:
If anyone causes one of these little ones – those who believe in me – to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.
Death is the final component that culminates the axis of loss. “Limousine” is the best example of this, as the entire song is about a car accident in which a 7 year old was decapitated by a drunk driver with a blood alcohol content of 0.28 (equivalent to 14 alcoholic drinks in one night). The sheer amount of emotion put into the song, along with the powerful and intense progression of the instrumental, makes it hard to hold back the tears. “Luca” also deals with death in a different light through the character of Luca Brasi from The Godfather (Mario Puzo, 1969), who was one of the few people Don Vito Corleone feared because he was a ruthless character who didn’t mind killing women and children. Given the negative image Jesse has of himself, I don’t find it crazy to think that he sees himself as Luca.
“Welcome to Bangkok” is, along with “[untitled]”, the only instrumental track on the record. It’s one of my personal highlights in the entire Brand New discography because of its cathartic progression and the peaks of intensity it reaches. It starts with a voice repeating “Space cadet, pull out” a few times, and then an acoustic guitar comes in to set the rhythm for an electric guitar that culminates in what reminds me of a mental breakdown.
The final song, “Handcuffs”, closes the album with a powerful outro that beautifully encapsulates the core concept of TDAGARIM. It’s the only track on the record not penned by Jesse Lacey, as it’s written by lead guitarist Vincent Accardi.
It’s hard to be the better man
When you forget you’re tryin’
It’s hard to be the better man
When you’re still lyin’
Jesse Lacey’s lyrics in TDAGARIM manage to make the listener feel sorry for him in both a pitiful and a sympathetic way. He gives an honest account of his feelings that seem to come from a deep, dark place of a tortured mind that truly feels bad for his deeds and the person he has become. To paraphrase a line from “Luca”, it’s clear that [Jesse] is up to no good. He is no longer the boy who used to make his parents proud, as he says in “Millstone”. Even though he has no reason to put himself in such a negative light in public, he does it anyway, making the album feel like a form of therapy for him, a way to shamelessly confront his own fears and deal with his suffering.
Although Jesse doesn’t explicitly address the issues that caused him so much pain, it’s evident that they were deeply troubling, which leads me to the following question: how could people be surprised when news broke in late 2017 that he had been accused of sexual misconduct by two women2? In fact, it seems that the reported events took place circa 2002, and TDAGARIM was released in 2006. When I see this kind of news, I reflect on the human condition and how we fall prey to our most primitive instincts in exchange for ruining our lives and carrying such a heavy millstone around our necks for the rest of our lives. No wonder he’s so afraid of what comes after death.
It’s hard to do the right thing when you forget what the right thing is. Maybe Jesse lost his way and couldn’t find his way back, but aren’t we all in danger of losing ours?
See footnote 1.