John F Duffy 's Top Five: Albums of the Late Nineties From Emo Bands You Never Heard Of

 

Top 5 Indie Albums of the Late Nineties from Emo Bands You Never Heard of

 

When I was a senior in high school at the tail end of the last millennium, I found myself enamored with a very niche genre of music that not many people had heard of at the time: emo. Now, this was the late nineties, and what people call emo today is a far cry from the music of the genre’s second wave, which was a direct descendent of hardcore. There was no eyeliner, no Jared Leto, and definitely no jokes using the word “emo” as a stand-in for  self-absorbed-sadness. This was also a time when the internet was still for dorks, no one carried a cell phone, and if you wanted to play music in your car, you had a CD player installed (with a removable faceplate, if you could afford it). If you wanted to find out about cool, underground music, you hung around a local record store and went to the shows listed in homemade zines or advertised on the flyers taped to the front window.

 

There are plenty of bands who started off in this word-of-mouth world of small shows in basements that you may have heard of: Modest Mouse, Bright Eyes, Death Cab for Cutie, Cursive, and Jimmy Eat World to name a few. All of these bands released great music in the late nineties, but they continued straight on through the aughts and up until today, and so they have a lot of name recognition with music fans. So many more great bands came and went, and were only known to a small cadre of devoted fans who kept the scene alive by regularly attending shows and buying merch. 

 

In my novel, A Ballroom for Ghost Dancing, the main characters came of age, like myself, in the late nineties, and starting in their teens they made a semi-successful run at playing in an emo band until the drummer finally quit to pursue other interests, having only ever scored one almost “hit” song. The characters in my book would definitely own the albums on this list in vinyl, and they definitely would have seen the bands who produced them live, liking them long before they were cool, and lamenting them when they split up. 

 

Here they are listed in chronological order of release:

 

1. Texas is the Reason Do You Know Who You Are https://revhq.com/products/texasisthereason-doyouknowwhoyouarethecompletecollection-2xlpcolorvinyl-cd

 

With a band name ripped from a Misfit’s song about the Kennedy assassination, Texas is the Reason only released one full length record, and it was 1996’s Do You Know Who You Are? When I think of this album, I think of the tight heads on the drums, and the sharp pop of the tom hits in the opening song, “Johnny on the Spot.” I also think about the ultimate singability of songs like “Back and to the Left.” Of all the albums on the list, this one is the least “sad,” which may make listener’s question if it’s even an emo record. Their sound was absolutely unique for the era, and hearing it decades later it’s impossible to deny the foundation the band laid for pop-punk bands that would follow in the next decade. Listening to their record, it’s easy to see how Texas is the Reason could have been a household name, and apparently they almost were. Offered a contract with Capitol Records in 1997, they could have gotten that major label push, but the band members decided to break up and go their separate ways instead. 

 

2. Braid The Age of Octeen https://www.polyvinylrecords.com/product/the_age_of_octeen

 

Picking a Braid album for this list is tough, as their first three LP’s are all strong for different reasons, and I kind of consider them THE emo band of record. If ever you want to know what “the sound” of the genre was, it was Braid. Full stop. Their first full LP, Frankie Welfare Boy Age Five, is raw, full of feeling, raw, moves fast, and did I say raw? (And that’s the good, full powered rock-and-roll kind of raw, not uncooked organ meat served up for dinner, raw). Their third LP, Frame and Canvas, (which gets a shout out in my novel) is much more polished and impossible not to sing along to. 1996’s, The Age of Octeen, falls right in the middle. The vocals still get a bit “screamy,” which is good, because it makes you feel cool when they blast out the window of your 1987 Ford Escort as you pull out of the High School parking lot, but songs like “Chandelier Swing” bring that punch-you-in-the-gut tender dreaminess that makes the genre what it is. After all, it wouldn’t be emo if the music weren’t bursting from the seams with emotion.

 

3. Mineral The Power of Failing https://www.discogs.com/release/1448916-Mineral-The-Power-Of-Failing   

 

I don’t remember how I heard of Mineral, but I know I picked up their 1997 album, The Power of Failing from my local record store after being so wowed by the first track that I knew I couldn’t leave the shop without it (yes, you could listen to a CD before you bought it at local record stores). With the perfect mix of heavy, distorted guitars and also slow, melancholic crooning, this album laid an emotional blueprint for the genre at large. If you were seventeen, and needed an album that could make you pump your first one moment, then clutch your heart and feel all the feels about the general existentialism that gathers us up when we’re young and charged with hormones and longing thanks to the boy or girl in third period who never looked our way, then The Power of Failing was for You. And if now you’re in your mid-thirties, furiously swiping left and right on a matchmaking app, wondering what the hell happened to the world, songs like “July” will have you singing along with Chris Simpson as he wails, “The sun fell down again last night on my frustration, and on my spite, and I didn't even cry, I didn't even try to stop it at all, I just stood there and watched it fall.”

 

4. Sunny Day Real Estate How it Feels to Be Something On https://www.musicdirect.com/music/vinyl/sunny-day-real-estate-how-it-feels-to-be-something-on-vinyl-lp/

 

I actually heard Sunny Day Real Estate’s fourth album first, and often hearing a band’s more evolved work can poison a listener against their earlier creations, but that was absolutely not the case for me with 1998’s How it Feels to be Something On, which is an experience of an album. Singer Jeremy Enigk’s voice and style are unlike anything you find elsewhere in pop music. The album is melodic and drifting, and makes for the perfect road trip listen (which might be why my characters play it as they drive across the US in my book). Strangely, the album is so good, so tight, and so unique, that it is at once the quintessential emo record, but also beyond the boundaries that most listeners would suggest form the genre at all. Songs like “Every Shining Time You Arrive,” will grab you and never let go, making you wonder how you never heard of this band before, and making you wish you could go back and purchase this record while you were still in college, flailing about to figure out who you were, desperate for an artistic crutch on which to lean on in your despair. But don’t worry, it’s just as good now that you’re all grown up, and life has delivered on every promise.

 

5. American Football LP 1 (https://www.polyvinylrecords.com/product/american_football_deluxe)

 

It was 1999 when American Football released their first self titled full length album, so it comes in just under the wire for this list. Melodic, sad, but with an interesting selection of instrumentation that constructs an ideal home for the color-outside-the-lines style of guitar play that Mike Kinsella (who also sings) has been known for before and since. This album is one of my favorite autumn-into-winter listens, and always transports me to a Chicago apartment where I stare wistfully out the window as the first snow begins to fall. Best played after a breakup, or even just as the days grow short and dark, American Football’s LP 1 is perfect for a night at home alone while you think about everything you wanted your life to be, and having it in your record collection will demonstrate to all your party guests that you have an intimate understanding of the roots of emo, far more than the silly bastards who bought into all that Fallout Boy nonsense.

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Originally from Chicago, John F Duffy is a writer who currently lives just outside of Bloomington, Indiana. His short fiction has appeared in Fly Over Country Lit, The Jupiter Review, Terror House Magazine, and Cutleaf Literary. In 2022, his podcast series, "After the Uprising" was nominated for an NAACP Image Award. Duffy's debut novel, "A Ballroom for Ghost Dancing," is available now, wherever books are sold.