After not having played a show in the Netherlands since 2007 and with four hugely successful albums under their belt Brand New will have to achieve the enormous task of living up to the highest of expectations. Well, it’s safe to say they did!
Support band The Front Bottoms are always good fun to watch with their wealth of songwriting brilliance and down-to-earth manner on stage. Yet even though everyone seemed to be having a good time, especially the few fans that were scattered around the room and singing along with live favourites such as ‘Au Revoir’ and ‘Maps’, the crowd was mostly just waiting for Brand New to start their set. It is never an easy task to open for such a loved and eagerly awaited band, but The Front Bottoms more than held their own. Well done lads!
The saying ‘good things come to those who wait’ seems to be invented for tonight’s special occassion though. Opening with ‘Vices’, shortly followed by ‘Gasoline’, ‘At The Bottom’ and ‘You Stole’, Brand New’s set starts off relatively slow and heavily influenced by their most recent album Daisy. It soon becomes clear, however, that this is not a ‘slow start’, but instead is a well-crafted setlist that incorporates songs from all four albums. ‘The Shower Scene’, taken from their first album Your Favourite Weapon, is well-received by the crowd and frontman Jesse Lacey is starting to warm up as well. He even starts cracking jokes when his guitar string breaks (“Well, that’s it for tonight, see you in twelve years”), something which is not typical of the usually quite calm vocalist. Brand New don’t do ‘shows with witty banter’, they do serious shows with songs that speak for themselves. Having thus established that not only the fans but also the band itself is having a good time, crowd pleasers ‘Sic Transit Gloria...Glory Fades’, ‘Seventy Times Seven’ and ‘The Quiet Things That No One Ever Knows’ send everyone into a bit of a frenzy.
‘Jesus’, ‘You Won’t Know’ and especially ‘Degausser’, filled with Jesse Lacey’s primal screams, form the perfect end to an evening that was well worth the (long!) wait. The fact that Jesse comes back to give us a beautiful and heartfelt rendition of ‘Play Crack The Sky’ is therefore quite unexpected but very very welcome.
It is never an easy task to live up to such high expectations, least of all when you haven’t brought out any new material in recent years and are perhaps not quite sure whether or not to expect a loyal following when playing so far from home anymore. Brand New, however, did an incredible job and made sure everyone in the room, whether they be fans of the old or newer albums, started the long way home with a smile on their face and the idea that 2014 is already a fantastic year for live music.
Submitted by Britt Meulenberg on 25-04-2014.
Pictures taken by Gerrit Smalbrugge of G.M. Photography.