Braid; photo via Topshelf Records
This past April, we were in the midst of what could qualify as a weeklong, 15-year class reunion for emo’s second wave. Mineral and American Football had just announced their upcoming fall tours; Sunny Day Real Estate released their first new song in a decade. That very same day, the more obtuse and obscure Philadelphia outfit the Jazz June put out“Over Underground”, their first new piece of new music since 2000. Capping it all off, quintessential Midwesterners Braid announced that this summer would bring their first LP since 1998.
All of these bands were intensely beloved and influential in their own scene but decided to opt out right before they could cash in on the genre’s commercial breakthrough around the turn of the century. While it’s never easy to ask a band about to put a dollar amount on missed opportunities, when I talk to the Jazz June’s now-London-based frontman Andrew Low over the phone, he immediately offers, “I can tell you exactly how much money we made. I personally have made negative 10,000 dollars being in the Jazz June for 20 years.”
Though reunions and reissues might be emotionally tricky business for fans, they can be a reliable windfall for the Neutral Milk Hotels and Pavements and Pixies of the world. But bands like Braid and the Jazz June aren’t beloved and influential towards the sort of people who control the big money in the music industry. It reverses the typical dynamic: The bands get a warm, nostalgic feeling playing slightly bigger rooms than they did in the late 90s, while the fans win big, taking comfort in the fact that their heroes clearly aren’t in it for a quick buck.
That’s changing ever so slightly in 2014: American Football reissued their only album in May and it charted at #69 on Billboard, right ahead of Drake’s Nothing Was the Same. Even Mineral, whose members were signed to separate Interscope deals before the band disintegrated, is selling out shows across the country. Granted, those are the reunions—one-time things, unsustainable models. Which is why the intrigue behind Braid and the Jazz June’s returns go beyond mere nostalgia. They find themselves far more invested: They’re putting their reputations on the line by actually making new albums.
When we talk on the phone, Braid singer/guitarist Bob Nanna concurs that if they’re coming back, it’s not for a much larger audience than before. When Mineral’s reunion shows were announced, Nanna recalls, “The whole Twitter feed is just people talking about Mineral, which is awesome. I would assume that they would rightfully blow up in this little world I’ve crafted for myself socially. In the grand scheme of things, these bands are barely little blips on the mainstream radar, which is fine.”
Still, Braid’sNo Coast (out July 8 on Topshelf Records) might be a brighter blip than usual. Their return has been called a reunion, which isn’t exactly true. They’d been showing signs of life post-Frame & Canvas, playing occasional shows and even releasing a new EP in 2011. But just like their current peers, Braid were only beginning to recognize their potential to instigate a genre renaissance; I won’t name names, but compare the current output of said peers to what they were doing two or three years ago and you’ll see why it took until 2013 for them to gain traction on a national level. And now, Low concedes a good deal of excitement surrounding the Jazz June’s upcoming record might have less to do with “the return of the Jazz June” than it does with the fact that it’s produced by Into It. Over It.’s Evan Weiss and released by current scene leader Topshelf. “Kids look at Topshelf’s roster and a lot of them sound like bands back in the day. You Blew It! put me back in my dorm room at Kutztown [University] when I was 19. Prawn sounds like Cap’n Jazz and American Football.”
Braid is in a similar position; No Coast was produced by Will Yip, an increasingly Steve-Albini-type figure who allows smaller bands access to hi-fidelity recordings that would otherwise be beyond their means. Even given Braid’s reputation, Nanna speculates that being affiliated with a younger indie label is liable to generate more interest. The Chicago native is deferential about his band’s current status: “I would rather people look at Braid like it’s a new Topshelf band—'wow, I like what they do, let’s check this out’—rather than resting on our credentials. It’s important to us to make it exciting and vital for people that aren’t in their late 30s.”
It makes sense. After all, are the older fans going to be the most supportive? This is a genre where most of its young fans are expected to age out of the music and move on into more “mature” forms of indie rock. How does a band from this scene age gracefully?
That’s a question that hasn’t really been answered yet, since most of the major players have started new projects that offered a clean break from their angsty, agitated former selves. Elliott’s Chris Higdon is now fronting the more blue-collar Frontier(s), American Football’s Mike Kinsella has evolved into solo troubadour Owen and the math-y Their / They’re / There, Chris Simpson of Mineral records under the name Zookeeper and even 3/4ths of Braid spent the early 2000s morphing into Hey Mercedes, a band typical of Vagrant’s up-the-middle post-Bleed American emo-pop. Jimmy Eat World is about the only band from that era still going—and in their attempt to make an “adult” breakup album on 2013’s Damage, they ended up sorta sounding like the Gin Blossoms.
Fortunately (or unfortunately), both Nanna and Low have been put in situations giving them an unintended ability to tap into the uncertainty and discord of their youth. Nanna says it was much easier to put together a new, start-from-scratch Braid album because he was recently laid off. "It feels like when I was 21," he says. "Didn’t have a job, didn’t know what’s happening and it was exciting. Filling my schedule with these things makes me happy." Low had a similar bottoming out, moving from Hoboken to London with his British girlfriend in 2007; the relationship dissolved and he took advantage of his indefinite visa to stay in the UK, where he’s now engaged and gainfully employed.
But wherever the two are spiritually, they recognize that they can’t tour and scrap the way they might’ve back when one could have their eyes on the prize, what Nanna describes as “the major-label feeding frenzy picking off bands like Jawbreaker and Jawbox and Shudder to Think and Get Up Kids to a certain extent.” Topshelf’s Kevin Duquette expects as much: “We went into this knowing that they wouldn’t be touring like it was 1998.” But it’s especially tough for the Jazz June, since Low has a steady life in London while the rest of the band are in Philadelphia and North Carolina. In fact, the new Jazz June songs only came together after Low convinced the band that “the internet will let us make it happen... just go on ProTools, don’t be scared of technology.” To a large degree, the internet has made it happen. Two years ago, "The Jazz June didn’t even have a Facebook page," Duquette jokes. "Like many other bands from that time, they started to poke their heads out and check back in to realize this’d come back full circle and there’s again a substantial audience for this niche in music they helped to mold."
When considering other recently reunited bands, Nanna mentions the Dismemberment Plan—possibly as a cautionary tale (their 2013 album, Uncanney Valley, was received tepidly by critics) but also as a kind of inspiration (they still got to crash the line-up of some major music festivals). “Reading some of the stuff that Travis Morrison wrote about it made it seem like the fun or the allure of playing at Coachella is being mentioned on these posters with these big bands that you grew up loving," he says. At this year's Coachella, D-Plan played a rare 12:05 AM set, across from Nas. “It doesn’t bother me too much that thousands and thousands of people didn’t watch the Dismemberment Plan," Nanna says, "but a thousand did and that’s awesome."
The title of Braid's No Coast is a double entendre—a reference to their Chicago homebase, as well as the goal of not resting on past accomplishments. It points towards a future, but it's worth wondering if the reinvigorated versions of Braid and Jazz June are sustainable; once the reunion tours and scene reports begin to wane, will there still be interest in No Coast's hypothetical 2016 follow-up? Nanna’s been at it too long to worry about that. “It’s unavoidable that these cycles repeat and there will be another emo revival in 15 years,” he shrugs. “In a decade, people will be saying, 'I was there when Into It. Over It. was starting out!'"