By 1997, the shine of grunge was wearing off and a new crop of bands was taking music in a more emotionally honest direction. Whether or not their members realized it, they were building the foundation for what would come to be labeled as emo. 1997: The Year Emo Broke explores the albums that drove this burgeoning genre that year.
Like many underground movements before it, emo was often accused of treating “girls in bands” as fetishized commodities. It was largely a space for white, suburban men to shine while limiting women to song subjects, supporters, and consumers who seldom existed in the spotlight. Despite the fact that emo’s second wave in the late 90s (which included bands like Braid and Mineral) rarely resorted to aggressively problematic lyrics like emo’s more commercially popular third wave in the 2000s, the exclusion of women from the scene revealed the movement’s latent misogyny. In 1997, Rainer Maria’s full-length debut, Past Worn Searching, helped usher change in a scene that had garnered a reputation as sexist.
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Rainer Maria formed in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1995, and released a self-titled EP in 1996. The trio’s “loud-quiet-loud” emo sound fell right in place with bands like The Promise Ring, Christie Front Drive, Joan of Arc, and New-York based The Van Pelt. Dissonant guitars and purposely unharmonious vocals mirrored much of the Midwest sound of the time, but Rainer Maria’s elegiac delivery and mysterious approach to self-promotion gave them a sort of art school aura. It wasn’t a pretentious sound that begged the listener to make leaps with the band, but mass accessibility certainly wasn’t a priority for Rainer Maria. Their sound was just elevated enough.
Past Worn Searching brought bassist/vocalist Caithlin De Marrais to the spotlight without treating her as a trinket for men to gawk at. The band’s success carved a larger space for women in emo, as they took the band out of Midwestern basements and living rooms, and across the country on a relentless touring schedule. They paved a way for other women to assert their space in what was then chiefly a boys’ club.
De Marrais’ jarring yet engrossing vocals took the lead on Past Worn Searching, with guitarist Kaia Fischer’s complimentary vocals providing support. Ultimately, De Marrais became the sole vocalist in Rainer Maria, making her one of emo’s most notable frontwomen, along with Jejune’s Arabella Harrison.
Album opener “Tinfoil,” set the tone with some of the most brusque and powerful lyrics on the album, as the duo of vocalists yelled, “Goddamnit / I’m not talking about my heart / Like it’s something you could break.” Perhaps unknowingly foreshadowing—or ushering in—themes emo would later overuse, like heartbreak resulting in literal sickness, De Marrais asked for an ambulance to keep her from going home alone, “Call an ambulance / I don’t want to walk home alone.”
“Sickbed,” recounted a bout with Hepatitis A—complete with vivid descriptions of smoke-filled hospital rooms and bodily functions. “My visitors smoked cigarettes and ate all the things that had me feeling unwell / Everything that came out of me was wrong-colored, or wasn’t at all,” they caterwauled before a gradual crescendo led the song into a driving illustration of paranoia.
The sound Rainer Maria produced on their early works is the definition of art house emo—discordant, atonal at times, and cunningly mawkish. The stammering rhythms and fitful guitar-work play off one another throughout the album, often joining in bursts of unrestrained rage. These buildups serve the album well, and to great dramatic effect. Nonetheless, they sometimes become a little formulaic after the middle of the album. The predictability would taint the record, were it not for the fact that each song can stand on its own arresting sound.
Unlike many bands from their same graduating class, Rainer Maria managed to survive well into emo’s mainstream era, though their sound gradually veered away from the dark and sometimes atonal emo they helped shape, and headed more into straightforward indie rock. By 2006’s Catastrophe Keeps Us Together, any sign of the Rainer Maria of old was difficult to decipher. The album’s polished, power-pop sound—sometimes reminiscent of early R.E.M. or The Beat—failed to push the band to the next level, and they broke up at the end of that year, playing their final show at North Six in Brooklyn, which had become a second home to them. An eight-year hiatus kept members of the band traveling the world and releasing music (Fischer and De Marrais both released solo albums, while drummer William Kuehn took drumming jobs around the globe). In 2017, three years after their reunion, they released their powerful and critically-lauded follow-up, S/T.
Past Worn Searching is a picture postcard from a turning point for emo. As attention to the genre grew, some bands from the mid- to late-90s generation of emo, like Hot Water Music, The Promise Ring, and Cursive, found varying degrees of success and influence on future generations. Others, like Rainer Maria had a sound that was difficult to market to wide audiences, though this didn’t stop the band from gaining a devout cult following, which continues to this day. Their influence, though not as readily extolled as that of a band like The Get Up Kids, continues to be a reference point for many, like Paramore, whose “Franklin” is a direct descendant of Rainer Maria’s sound. Other bands, like Football etc., Adventures, and Death Party, continue to carry the torch Rainer Maria lit, as one of the first emo bands to kick down the door of the exclusionary emo boys’ club.
Eddie Cepeda is the founder of Mother of Pearl Vinyl and a writer in New York City. Follow him on Twitter.
