Tell Us the Truth – Brand New Age
It basically takes one look at the album cover and tracklisting, and listening to the first ten seconds to understand that Brand New Age hasn’t written a happy go lucky album on Tell Us the Truth. The four horsemen of the apocalypse on the cover, track names such as No one’s innocent, Hang em all high and Young dumb and full of cum and shootings and doomsday church bells in the intro sets a pretty clear tone for the album.
Brand New Age makes gritty punkrock with a touch of Oi!. Perhaps streetpunk is a better word for the subgenre. They would probably describe themselves as an Oi!-band, and it’s definitely incorporated into their sound, but it mixes it up with punkrock a lot. The production is gritty to the edge of taking something away from the tracks, perhaps a little bit sleeker production would have helped here. The singer has eaten gravel for breakfast the last decade it sounds like, but it fits the sound perfectly.
Oi! is not really my main genre, although one of my all time favourite albums is No Mercy For You by The Business. It would be unfair to compare Tell Us the Truth with that album though. This album surely has its moments, as in Hang em all high and You call us scum, and the writing is pretty solid, although a bit repetitive at times. It’s overall not very unique sounding though, but the genre is on the other hand not one where that’s premiered either. The problem with that is that it becomes easy to compare it with other albums from colleagues present and past.
And that’s probably my biggest problem here. The album is one of those that makes me want to throw on The Business, Cock Sparrer or Voice of a Generation. It’s not bad, that’s not the problem, it’s good craftsmanship with a good genre know-how, but the problem is that big parts of it have been done before, and have been done a bit better.
People who are much more initiated in the genre could very well say that this is really good, but for someone who has only scratched the surface, it doesn’t leave a very lasting impression. I do of course encourage everyone to listen to Brand New Age and Tell Us the Truth themselves and make up their own impression, but I would say that this is for the fans of the genre mainly. Oi!-beginners can look elsewhere to begin with.