Emo for Dummies

Think of this as an introduction to emo. One that doesn't claim to be definitive, nor to fully clarify the possible meanings this term has taken on and might still take on. That would open up an endless, and rather tedious, debate about what's "real" and what's "posturing," or about where the music ends and the fashion begins. The kind of discussion that delights bored teenagers looking for an argument, but is decidedly not what we're after here. We've tried to put together a selection that reflects what emo means to us: you'll find genre classics, hidden gems, and bestsellers. Because what defines belonging to emo isn't aesthetics, and it isn't sales figures either: it's the language of emotion above all, expressed - as time has gone on - in different ways.

Mineral – The Power Of Failing (Crank!, 1995)

The brief but intense existence of Mineral (1994-98) marked one of the crucial turning points of emo, the moment when the genre took shape and became its own creature, autonomous, free to express itself at the height of its potential. It's hard to find in rock music a more heart-wrenching, open-hearted confession than the one found on "The Power Of Failing". It's not fidelity you should look for in the sound of Mineral, a band that was never ashamed to show its own imperfections, if that could help make their music more sincere and direct. I've always thought that if they couldn't repeat themselves with the following record, ending up splitting (even though Simpson would reinvent himself a few years later with the Gloria Record), it's because by then everything had already been said on this masterpiece: Chris Simpson pours out his whole soul, all his tears, offering glimpses of pure, devastating poetry ("I wouldn't mind if you took me in my sleep tonight, I wouldn't even put up a fight/ I wouldn't care if you took it all away today, I'm sure I wouldn't even miss the pain").

Those gorgeous melodies that seem to fall from the sky, first whispered faintly and then screamed at the top of one's lungs, are the release of a pain repressed for far too long. The mournful chords of "Five, Eight, Ten" kick in, and you already know a flood of emotion is about to crash down on you, with unpredictable alternating soft/loud passages, subdued moments followed by shattering instrumental cascades. An unrepeatable record, capable of wrecking a day, maybe a life.

Texas Is the Reason – Do You Know Who You Are? (Revelation Records, 1996)

A New York band formed from members of Shelter, Copper and Fountainhead, Texas Is The Reason recorded one of the masterpieces of post-"Diary" emo, as well as their only album, "Do You Know Who You Are?", quoting what may have been the last words said to John Lennon before he was murdered. "Texas Is The Reason" was the line the Misfits sang back in 1978 on "Bullet", referencing a conspiracy theory about the assassination of J. F. Kennedy that also surfaces on this record ("Back And To The Left", "The Magic Bullet Theory"). Allusions aside — including a nod to "Twin Peaks" in "A Jack With One Eye" — "Do You Know Who You Are?" is an inward-looking, personal record steeped in an epic and disarming sense of loss, an unbroken dialogue without answers between singer Garrett Klahn and an invisible "other half" to whom the entire album is dedicated. Powerful guitar riffs, an overwhelming rhythm section and shape-shifting song structures carry the listener breathlessly through to the final track, whose closing line sums up the meaning of the record and the mark it left on an entire generation: "Your place is still at the heart of my everything" ("A Jack With One Eye"). After a European tour, Texas Is The Reason decided to split up, right at the peak of their artistic and expressive powers, reforming only twice, in 2006 and 2012.

Get Up Kids – Four Minute Mile (Doghouse Records, 1997)

Barely eighteen years old, the Get Up Kids loaded their gear into a car in Kansas City and drove to Chicago, where Bob Weston of Shellac was waiting to record them. "Four Minute Mile" is a record steeped in the best years of adolescence, full of fervor ("I couldn't give in. I gave up. I gave in" — "Lowercase West Thomas"), doubt ("If I tried, would you still call me son? If I tried, would you call me at all?" — "Fall Semester") and romantic torment ("If I came home one last night, think of what the two of us could do, I guess will never know" — "No Love"). It smells of the grass on a high school playing field, made of wins and losses, excitement and disappointment, the kind you've seen in so many films, immortalized on the album cover.

Singer-guitarists Matthew Pryor and Jim Suptic drive the band through a whirlwind of emocore where everything sounds sky-high and full-throttle. Arpeggios and interlocking lines, stops and sudden restarts, a dry sound and a production that keeps the vocals up front, almost as if you had to scream just to be heard. A true coming-of-age story, a bildungsroman about adolescent love: solipsistic, contradictory, comforting, unresolved. After three albums and a turn towards indie rock, Pryor would disband the group and tell the story of adulthood with the New Amsterdams.

The Van Pelt – The Sultans of Sentiment (Gern Blandsten, 1997)

New York's Van Pelt are the highly original expressive vehicle of Chris Leo, former guitarist of Native Nod and brother of Ted Leo, leader of Chisel and the Pharmacists. The frontman's erudite, cryptic lyricism has nothing to do with the simplicity, bordering on adolescent rhetoric, typical of the American emocore scene; the leanness of the sound, the steady precision and control of the rhythm section, and the skillful use of guitars meant to hypnotize the listener with just a few crystalline notes, all set them apart from the genre's usual instrumental impetuosity. And yet, starting with the statement of intent in the title itself, it's hard to place Van Pelt outside the scene. Chris Leo's spoken-word voice — sharp, at times shrill, apparently cold and over-the-top in its deliberately declamatory tone — leads a small orchestra that plays only what's essential (even repeating single notes, as in the final solo of "Nanzen Kills A Cat"), softening where needed ("Don't Make Me Walk My Own Log") or exploding into the strangled screams of "My Bouts With Pouncing". On "Yamato (Where People Really Die)" and "We Are The Heatens" the band pushes the throttle and saturates the guitars, but the moments that make "Sultans Of Sentiment" a uniquely cerebral masterpiece within the genre are "The Good, The Bad And The Blind" — an emotional crescendo built from a handful of simple arpeggios — and the minimal, metrically imperfect calm of "Let's Make A List": "We are not housewives, executives, or entrepreneurs. We are teachers by trade, complainers by role".

Rainer Maria – Past Worn Searching (Polyvinyl Records, 1997)

Kyle Fischer (guitar and vocals) and Caithlin De Marrais (bass and vocals) met at a poetry workshop at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Together with William Kuehn (drums) they formed Rainer Maria (dropping the "Rilke"), writing the lyrics for their first album while still in college. Pure lyricism is the driving force behind "Past Worn Searching", whose songs are built from taut lyrics and intense vocal melodic lines, with a feminine touch unique within the emo landscape. A poetic sensibility, melodic but also visual, in verses that, like the voices themselves, chase one another through visions (“My eyes are becoming curtains/ Paint the window, stain the ceiling fervish green/ My visitors smoked cigarettes and all the things that had me feeling unwell” — "Sickbed"), snapshots (“This broken scene with me above you above me/ I feel broken/ Didn’t you hear me?” — "Viva Anger, Viva Hate") and sequences with a cinematic flavor (“I thought the ice is melting/ We could talk on the lake/ Not far from our house, the park is wetter than yesterday/ I won’t swallow my pride” — "Half Past April"). Rainer Maria would go on to a more skillful and balanced indie rock, but "Past Worn Searching" remains a penetrating and essential debut.

Sunny Day Real Estate – How It Feels to Be Something On? (Sub Pop, 1998)

The fever sparked by SDRE's first two albums was slowly fading, cooled by the hiatus that followed the release of "LP2". Two albums that contained everything instantly associated with the word "emo" at the time, even though in reality these fine records still bore a fairly clear grunge influence (Smashing Pumpkins above all). In '98, though, the band decided to return, and fans expecting more melodic, heart-wrenching ballads were inevitably left disappointed: "How It Feels to Be Something On?" sounds dark from the very first listen, almost closed in on itself and impenetrable.

An inner excavation through nightmares and torments, born of a sensitivity that here emerges in all its depth. The guitar lines turn anxious and neurotic, the bass carves out dark, menacing grooves, percussion and drones lend the atmosphere a spectral quality, while the voice intones chants as if in a trance. The band communicates with an entirely new expressiveness in its instrumental sections, complex and shape-shifting, a crossroads of genres and styles. It's one of the records that best captures the 1990s, a decade shot through with an underlying unease that was never resolved.

Each song, almost as if this were a prog record, patiently builds toward its own unexpected climax: "Pillars" spills over into a furious, hysterical crescendo, "Every Shining Time You Arrive" is their classic ballad, but shot through with a disillusionment more mature than ever before. And after a "The Prophet" with a gothic, ancestral flavor, there's room once again for bitter tears in "The Shark's Own Private Fuck", by far the highest emotional peak SDRE ever reached. A record for the soul, one that reaches the heart by indirect paths, less immediate than those of their early work, but that once it settles in, occupies a permanent place there.

American Football – American Football (Polyvinyl, 1999)

You could call it the “bourgeoisie” of emo: how do you whisper when your chest is thrown wide open? And yet American Football remain one of the most beloved cult bands, despite having only one album to their name before splitting up. This self-titled record could sit at once among the most technical and the most emotional albums ever made – the challenge lies in fitting the shifting moods of emo into the numerical expressions of math-rock. So the countless shades of the inner life of an eternal adolescent, Mike Kinsella, are compassionately caressed by Steve Holmes’s barely reverberating, bare arpeggios, marked out by Steve Lamos’s sobbing drum rolls – physicality and spirituality seem locked together in one uneasy embrace. Every note, every deviation seems to sketch a design, leaving the outlines for last, in order to fall perfectly in tune with the fickle moods of the soul. A trumpet sometimes stands in for the voice, bringing to light the beautiful substance of “American Football”: a deep exhalation of the spirit.

The Appleseed Cast – Mare Vitalis (Deep Elm Records, 2000)

We're already in 2000 when Deep Elm Records – the indie label famous for its “The Emo Diaries” compilations – releases Appleseed Cast's “Mare Vitalis”. Somewhere between the classic emocore of their debut “The End Of The Ring Wars” and the more elaborate sound of their later albums, “Mare Vitalis” sounds like the experiment of a band trying to break free from the genre's standard structures while holding on to a few general rules: torrential drumming, hard-hitting guitar riffs, and a subdued voice/instrument ready to explode, wrapped tightly in melodic interplay that repeats like a pop-length mantra.

A concept album in which a homogeneous sound and liquid arrangements evoke the power of the sea, plunging into depths that are anything but reassuring (“The Immortal Soul Of Mundo Cani”) or simulating its swell (the wah pedal on the closing “Storms”). What lingers are the vaguely post-rock expanses that precede the “wall of sound” chorus of “Fishing The Sky”, the energetic riffs and closing charge of “Forever Longing The Golden Sunset”, and the classic, raging vocal spleen of “Secret” and “Kilgore Trout”.

My Chemical Romance – I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought My Love (Eyeball, 2002)

This is where the saga of the most controversial band in emo history begins. The one that brought the genre its greatest commercial success while also opening a deep rift between what emo had been up to that point and what it would become in the wake of their fame. Whether you love them or hate them, you simply can't discuss emo, even in an introductory overview, without mentioning them. A 12-year “novel” that ended on its bitterest note, the split that happened this year, which in hindsight only sharpens the retrospective look at what this band meant for the past decade. If the final phase of their music sank into bombastic posturing, their debut album instead brims with a blazing vitality they never matched again over a full-length. So how did the most famous American band of the 2000s introduce themselves to the world? With an album that strings together a series of killer melodies, the kind that bring tears to your eyes, gorgeously produced and backed by breathtaking instrumental work. An album populated by vampires and ghostly creatures, described in ways that, in some respects, anticipate the aesthetic of “Twilight”, but without its more debased traits. Just listen to the single “Vampires Will Never Hurt You” to grasp the sheer grandeur of this sound: five and a half minutes of psychotic delirium screamed at the top of one's lungs, full of constant shifts and changes of pace, about as far as you can get from “mass appeal”.

And how can you not hear, in the romantic epic of “Skylines And Turnstiles”, the desperate cries of post-9/11 America? Next came “Three Cheers For The Sweet Revenge”, with its gorgeous singles, and then definitive success with “The Black Parade”, but if you want to be convinced of this band's artistic depth, you have to start at the beginning. From 2002. Here begin the ten intense years of a band that, for better or worse, marked a generation.

Brand New – The Devil And God Are Raging Inside Me (Interscope, Tiny Evil, 2006)

In other words, the manifesto of 2000s emo. The record that once and for all set the genre's production standard and broadened its dynamics, even edging toward near-prog structures. It's interesting that the emo masterpiece of our times sits in a place almost antithetical to the one occupied by a record like “The Power Of Failing”; but if we consider how far the language of emo exploded over the past decade, it becomes easier to believe that a genre born in the bedroom could eventually reach the masses. “The Devil And God” is essential precisely because it sounds grandiose without being bombastic, universal without being needlessly rhetorical. The production reaches absolute peaks, the lyrics speak of small, personal tragedies from which a faint light rarely emerges, but they never retreat into painful self-absorption: as if through film editing, we're pulled into different perspectives and points of view of extraordinary psychological depth. So that prayer of devastating beauty, “Jesus”, takes on the shape of a choral invocation, and the searing explosion of “Sowing Season” brings release not only to the band's frontman, Jesse Lacey. The identification is almost total.

The album's title alludes to the eternal inner conflict between Good and Evil, but here it's the latter that seems to prevail. Death is everywhere: in the stunning cover art, where horror lurks behind an unsuspecting little girl, and in the tragic “Limousine”, the story of Katye Flynn, a seven-year-old girl run over and killed by a car. It's a presence that looms over the instrumental textures too, at times desolate, at times unsettling, almost never radiant, claustrophobic even when dripping with melody (and this album is packed with it). A record that captures the complexity of our times like few others.

Gioele Sforza: introduction, Mineral, Sunny Day Real Estate, My Chemical Romance, Brand New

Enrico Viarengo: introduzione, The Van Pelt, The Appleseed Cast

Maria Teresa Soldani: Texas Is The Reason, Get Up Kids, Rainer Maria

Lorenzo Righetto: American Football

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This article is an English translation of the original Italian text by Enrico Viarengo, published on OndaRock.it. It was translated with the help of artificial intelligence, under the editorial responsibility of OndaRock's editor-in-chief, Claudio Fabretti.

Read the original in Italian · About the English edition