"And it's like, 'How did Sunny Day Real Estate do a reunion tour?' I swear, it's like anyone with a Sub Pop Single Of The Month did one!" - Courtney Love, the year of Braid's third reunion tour
EMO. Perhaps the most misunderstood phrase in music discourse of all time, and that's really saying something. Everyone's probably seen the REAL EMO ONLY CONSISTS OF THE D.C. EMOTIONAL HARDCORE SCENE etc copypasta at this point, but just to recapitulate: 1985 in D.C. is called the Revolution Summer. Members of the foundational hardcore bands formed new groups - Ian MacKaye from Minor Threat formed embrace, Brian Baker, also of Minor Threat, formed Dag Nasty, and Eddie Janney from the Faith formed Rites Of Spring. These bands pioneered a more sensitive, less violent approach to the D.C. sound they'd invented. People - musicians and audience members - are said to have burst into tears at early gigs by these lot. It was hardcore punk, but emotional. Like, emotional hardcore or something.
Anyway - helped along by a band called Moss Icon who everyone in the know says is absolutely key to every subsequent emo band, even though they aren't even on the wikipedia page for emo - plenty of hardcore bands would adopt this more melodic, emotional approach as the 80s came to close. This is actual emo. Everything else is, in some respect or another, different enough - "fake" enough if you fancy startin beef - from the O.G.s to warrant a different tag.
The dominant style in the 90s has been called all sorts of shit - Midwestern emo, second-wave emo, 'post-emo indie rock' - but the point is it's far less hardcore-influenced and far more indie- and alternative-rock sounding. This is my personal favourite era. Jawbreaker ended up far poppier and far less serious than their Californian peers (and they'd lampoon their more hardcore peers by singing "You're not punk, and I'm telling everyone" on 'Boxcar'); a young Billie Joe Armstrong was a huge fan. Sunny Day Real Estate were a non-grunge Seattle band, a rarity in 1994, and pioneered the more anthemic, less punky side of things. Christie Front Drive were from Denver and were instrumental in what would come to be known as "twinkly emo". Mineral started out as the Texas Sunny Day Real Estate but on their second album they made a sharp left turn into that twinkly realm too. Jimmy Eat World and the Get Up Kids brought the power pop chops. Cap'n Jazz were far more chaotic and far younger than these bands, and once they imploded their members would form all sorts of important bands of their own - The Promise Ring, americ anfootball, Joan of Arc.
There are also plenty of emo-adjacent bands from near enough the same time that ended up being an influence on these groups as well as the 2010s revival bands. Fugazi was formed by a guy from Rites of Spring and a guy from embrace and were fiercely independent and fiercely experimental. I've already talked about Shudder To Think on this blog. Chavez were an influence on the heavier, mathier bands. And so on.
I really could go on forever - I'm listening to Elliott now as I edit this - but I'm supposed to be talking about Braid. They were my favourites when I got into this style back in 2013 and '14. They could twinkle like Christie, they could cause chaos like Cap'n Jazz, they could write the odd pop song like Jimmy Eat World, and they even covered the Smiths, who were a big influence on the 90s emo bands with their bloodletting lyrics and jangly guitars. They were almost tailor-made to be catnip for slightly weird fifteen-year-olds like me. They formed in 1994 and broke up in 2000s, dovetailing nicely with the 90s emo scene I was just explaining. "Wait, isn't this 'Albums Of The 2010s?'" Hold on, man, I'm getting to it.
In the 2000s, emo got famous. If you're not a fan of the 90s stuff you probably know emo by way of hating these bands that came up in the wake of Jimmy Eat World's crossover success with "The Middle" in 2001. My Chemical Romance, Thursday, Taking Back Sunday, the Used, Fall Out Boy, Paramore, and Panic!, each band moving slightly further away from "hardcore" or even "emo". Panic! were literally just a pop band that were friends with Pete Wentz. Of course, hardcore people hated these lot, see this excellent series on "Bands You Weren't Supposed To Like" for more info. A lot of these bands did have legitimate roots in hardcore, though - you don't believe me, so I'm just gonna start by saying Patrick Stump played drums for powerviolence bands and Pete Wentz often moonlighted for an early metalcore band called Racetraitor before FOB and let you search for the rest - and Fall Out Boy were so into Braid they nicked a song title off them for their first album. Hipster types mostly ignored this type of music, which was far better than the scathing reviews places like Old Pitchfork gave to late-career efforts from Sunny Day Real Estate and The Promise Ring at the turn of the millenium.
Three of the four guys from Braid made a wee push for the mainstream in the early 2000s too. They called themselves Hey Mercedes and the world greeted them with a collective "meh." Hey, that's the same riff as the We The Kings song that's the same riff as the Boys Like Girls song! Small world. Hey Mercedes disbanded in 2005, Braid did a little reunion tour around the same time, and that was that.
But something changed at the turn of the last decade. Bands like Algernon Cadwallader and Snowing were at the vanguard of a Philadelphia scene that took influence from math rock, post-rock, and the first two decades of emo's history, while conveniently skipping the "eyeliner" era typified by My Chem and Fall Out Boy. By 2013 there was a full-scale "emo revival" in the works. All sorts of different spins of the genre were attempted - JANK (cancelled, like properly, the singer is a rapist, among other things but they were popular at the time and therefore bear mentioning) were poppier, Turnover brought the dream pop, Into It. Over It. was more of a solo singer-songwriter, The World Is A Beautiful Place And I Am No Longer Afraid To Die were the emo Arcade Fire, Touché Amoré were heavier, again, I could go on all day.
That brings us to 2014. As the disparaging quote from Courtney Love at the beginning noted, Sunny Day Real Estate had momentarily reformed and toured. That band absolutely fucking hates each other though, and so, after producing one new song - "Lipton Witch" - they broke up for, like, the fifth time (one after each album and one for luck!). Braid, however, were on their third go of things, and wanted to make new music. They'd gone on tour in '05 like I said, but that was a one time thing and they went back to side projects afterward. They tried things again in 2011, just as the emo revival wave was getting started, but the resultant EP was not well received at all. An emo pan from 2002 Pitchfork is par for the course - honestly, it probably means the album is a classic - but in 2011, from Ian Cohen, The Main Emo Guy At Pitchfork, it was painful. I think it's alright, but it was clearly not enough, so they tried again, and No Coast was the result.
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| remember to not forget this btw :) |
I choose to highlight Braid for a few reasons. The first thing is I never actually listened to the revival bands, so I can't write about any of their albums. Lord knows I've tried over the years, but none of it has hit me. However, it's unlikely I would've gotten into the original bands had the emo revival not happened. See, if history is written by the victors, music history is written by the nerdy kids twenty years later. That David Lee Roth quote about "music writers [liking] Elvis Costello more than [Van Halen] because they look like Elvis Costello" is 100% correct. Look at a picture of Robert Christgau and a picture of Elvis Costello and prove him wrong. Music writers, like all writers, are nerds.
The accepted canon circa 2010, when I was first getting into music, would have absolutely no place for Weezer or Sunny Day Real Estate, let alone the more obscure groups like Moss Icon and Christie Front Drive, but as those 90s kids, like Ian Cohen, were able to put their own stamp on things, as well as the revival bands who were unashamedly influenced by these groups, Jimmy Eat World were able to take their place just a step below already lauded groups like Pavement and the Flaming Lips. What we're already beginning to see is a new generation of music writers, and another generation of musicians, rehabilitate the 2000s emo that's been so maligned. Miranda Reinert and Ellie from You Don't Need Maps, who I keep linking, are just two writers I'm a fan of that are part of this new gen, and, as I'll get to, the soundcloud rap boom of 2017ish was so emo it hurt. XXXTENTACION was recording quiet/loud/quiet screamo songs as often as he would record SZA interpolations as often as he'd record actual rap songs, Juice WRLD took the hard-luck-with-women angle in emo that I haven't really touched on in this post but will do in another and ran with it, and, oh my goodness, is that a Mineral sample under this Lil Peep song? Lil Uzi Vert's "Influences" section on Wikipedia lists Hayley Williams from Paramore before it lists literally any rapper, for fuck's sake.
The second thing is Braid are one in an increasingly long list of successful revivals. Of course, big bands have been reforming since, I don't know, Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young acting as a de facto Buffalo Springfield reunion. But over the past ten years it's become increasingly common for bands to not only get back to it for the money, Hell Freezes Over-style, but actually produce excellent work on a par with their original stuff. Off the top of my head, Dinosaur Jr were the first, and perhaps the most suprising considering the bad blood between J Mascis and Lou Barlow, but the post-2007 incarnation has now produced more albums of more consistently high quality than the original 1985-90ish setup. Then as the decade progresses we have Swans producing career highlights like The Seer, My Bloody Valentine finally releasing m b v, Slowdive reforming for Slowdive, and others I'm sure I'm forgetting. No Coast fits in pretty well with the rest of Braid's discography in this same way.
It's maybe less frenetic than their 90s output - there's nothing in the way of a "To Kiss A Trumpet Player" or "Consolation Prizefighter" - but that's to be expected from a group of fortysomething dads. Their pop sense is undiminished, Will Yip probably produces the album better than any of their originals were, and Chris Broach in particular is probably a better singer than he was in his adolescence. When they said they wouldn't coast they were telling the truth, the album holds its own.
This is kind of a problem, though! What does it mean that some of the most relevant, acclaimed albums of the early 2010s were released by people in middle age? Not just No Coast, but all the bands I mentioned up there. Of them, only Swans were really reinventing themselves, otherwise Dino, MBV, Braid, are all just tinkering and perfecting what they did in the 80s and 90s. Over the past few years I've often felt there's some level of stagnation in the music world, but this is probably wrong of me. Of course there are still interesting things happening, they just have to be searched for. It's also a misunderstanding of what music is for and how it is consumed. As someone who's obsessed with the history of music, the kind of person that would write about albums from the past decade on their own time and seriously enjoy it, it's natural that I tend to search for, and gravitate toward, novelty. I think this tendency is magnified among actual professional music critics, because they have to listen to so much music that the 340th My Bloody Valentine ripoff will probably not impress them no matter how good the songs are.
Braid, however, come from the hardcore scene, and the punk scene more generally, and that kind of music is all about performance, and catharsis, and community. Most of the albums I've focused on so far - Lorde, Drake, Two Door, and so on - are Big Albums made on Big Budgets for Big Audiences. Just as I absolutely cannot imagine Braid owning the stage at the O2, I can't imagine Drake playing the pub down the road. The things that make an amazing punk band - things like spontaneity and connection to their local area - aren't really the things that make amazing pop, or even amazing music. I feel kind of stupid even attempting to dig deep and get into the obscurities with a lot of punk and hardcore - if you fancy it Fear Of A Punk Planet seems like an excellent place to start - because it's not the kind of music that means so much being streamed years and years later. I listen to the Faith or Embrace right now and I don't really get it, because I'm completely devoid of the context, the personal connections, the performance, that made 1980s D.C. kids build their lives around early, early emo.
I think this is why hyping underground scenes can often fall flat, and that looms large in my mind at the moment as what I disparagingly call 'them Brixton lot' - Shame, Sorry, black midi, and most recently Black Country, New Road - hit the indie bigtime. I'm out of the loop. I've never been to the Windmill, I've seen Shame live (they were fine) and Sorry opened for them, and as a kid from the Deep South a bunch of posh(-seeming) kids gallivanting round ends I could never afford to live in writing mediocre The Fall ripoffs does not appeal in the slightest. But these bands will mean so much to the people that frequent those areas, and they clearly mean a lot to each other. As cringe as it may be to a lot of people, my favourite line from Black Country, New Road's debut, For the first time, is "I told you I loved you in front of black midi." That's the kind of scene interaction that will transcend the flash-in-the-pan reviews, the failed follow-ups, all of it. In twenty years, Black Country, New Road will reform, and a forty-year-old Phoebe Bridgers or Snail Mail or someone will say "ugh, how did those guys do a reunion tour?" and it will be off the backs of the kids who were there when it mattered, however large that group ends up. Just like it was for Braid. No Coast ends with a song titled "This Is Not A Revolution", and while they might not have been showing us the shape of punk to come on the album, bands like Braid taking their rightful place in the discourse is a little revolution of its own.
Now, for the other albums of note. I really wasn't listening to ANY new music between 2013 and 2016 so I looked at the highest selling albums, and then Pitchfork and Stereogum's top tens, and Christ there is nothing I want to talk about. Four of Pitchfork's top ten this year - Sun Kil Moon's Benji, Run The Jewels 2, Aphex Twin's syro, and To Be Kind by Swans - are all acts with at least 20 years of history. The highest selling album here was Ed Sheeran's x, and for the Yanks it was the Frozen Soundtrack. Now I remember why I wasn't listening to any new music in 2014. Good Lord. Cilvia Demo by Isaiah Rashad is I guess the only non-Braid album I like from this time period. Bye.
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