deep thoughtz 012: FRAME & CANVAS - BRAID

Ahhh it's time to relax, you know what that means! A glass of kefir, your favorite mountain of pillows and bedsheets piled into a beanbag-like chair, and of course this piece of educational reading material coming at you with the power of my bronzed fingertips. Yessiree, it is time for the NEXT installment of our Deep Thoughtz series where we're bound to hit you with a breathtaking collection of autumnal jingles by a rather jejune collective of Midwestern scrappy-doos. Join me in this month of Gee-Zus for some good ol' second-wave emo music to be an unproductive douchebag to, let's hear it for BRAID!

hi there i'm elvis anaporn and i'm urging you never to travel to the greater midwestern area 👻

Partial disclosure: I've actually already collected my thoughtz on their prior album on the Glorious Sputnikmusic website (link here read now kthxbai), but four years, three thousand views, and a few LSD trips can change a man and his once static music tastes derived exclusively from hurt feelings and Morrissey worship. The Wonder Years, Remo Drive, TWIABP&IANLATD, Pianos Become The Teeth, all former great loves that've since fallen to the wayside in favor of PILLSBURY HARDCORE, EAZY-MUTHAPHUCKKIN-E, and BRITNEY SPEARS BEECH. But Braid, and a select few others, have maintained steady rotation in my car when the leaves start to fall and u gotta dress like brown santa klaus to stay warm while steppin out to bus a spliff. The music here doesn't occupy any extreme, either in dynamics, lyrical depth, or emotional posturing, but it captures something unique and even the loudest bands in the world can fail to do that. 

yeahyeahyeah emo kids live in houses, we get it guyz no need to rub it in to the crusties

The sounds produced by Braid are less violent than Rites of Spring, The Faith, and other first wave emo groups, retaining the speed and dynamic nature of these groups and turning the focus on feelings of anxiety and intermittent intimacy with the world rather than anguish n angst. Music made in equal parts with consideration for those who want to dance in community centers and those who just want to cry in the shower. Truly patrician qualities one should expect in any rawk bannd. The sorrowful melodies of songs like Never Will Come For Us, A Dozen Roses, Urbana's Too Dark, and I Keep a Diary are standard cream of the crop of 90's emo, perfect little nuggets of melancholy pop rock to rollerskate your broken heart to and good introductions for listeners who find Braid's overall sound too snarky to be emotionally resonant. The other songs on the album dance across the several movements of emo, never diving too deeply into the branching genres that future bands would explore but taking the best elements and filtering what doesn't stick. The bass and guitar lines on The New Nathan Detroits, First Day Back, and Breathe In aren't as flashy as the Tiny Moving Parts of today would utilize, and the harsh screaming throughout the album is too often supplemented by yelpy lines of poetry to be in the same boat as screamo groups like Old Gray. Unlike Tiny Moving Parts and Old Gray however Braid doesn't suck asshole and have toxic fanbase of sensitive new englanders and ivy league students. 

really ain't an emo show if u ain't lookin bored af

Growing up in the suburbs of the Midwest, I was more into Metallica, Motley Crue, and other COP BULLSHIT MUSIC than the middling melodies of Braid as a young thirteen year old; riding bicycles, kicking down Mitt Romney signs, and slippin love letters into lockers of girls I'd talked to maybe twice. The music of Braid (and other playful post-hxcore/indie hybrid groups like Cap'n Jazz) captures the pitfalls of those horrific times as much as they do the better times. For every day that was wasted on self-denial and degenerative Internet forums, there were days of golden imagination, of wonder and awe at the possibilities of life and the people in this world. I was talkin with a d-beat enthusiast on emo music, and they wondered on the value of music dedicated to the act of being overtly, well, EMOtional. Didn't seem productive in either a self-fulling, political, or societal context (outside of scene beef, of course), and frankly I was at a loss for a decent response. It's always been a stereotype that emo music is one-note, encourages self-destruction, and doesn't really get u girls the way bumpin some BROCKHAMPTON would (at least amongst the collegiates). These things, I'd made my own answers to already. Questioning the merit of the genre, however, that I was not prepared for. I meditated on the question and found myself growing distant from the scene, especially given the Great Emo Drought of 2018 brought on by Mom Jeans' latest LP (shudders). 

But as Jack Black has said, the greatest music is the music that passes the ultimate test. And that test, is the test of time. Braid's music certainly doesn't mean the same thing to me as it did when I had bangs and wore keychains for bracelets, rather the sounds grew with me and changed as I changed. The songs remained the same, but the dimensions they took on in my ears changed with maturation (ironically enough for music dedicated to the child-like dimensions of feelings). Not many bands can do that, regardless of genre or talent. Give these Midwestern bois a shot, see how u feel after.

(also not important but there must b some kind of conspiracy with this band being Bob Nanna's proxy for a film career cuz there r too many references to film, photography, lighting, the act of watching movies, making movie music, etc. Songs like Killing a Camera, Movie Clock Star, Harrison Ford, their two compilation albums Movie Music, the album Frame & Canvas, Bob Nanna's side project The City on Film, the Frame and Canvas album being rereleased in a film reel casing, lyrics like "i'll be the camera if you'll be the star", "we're screening the screams and floor the fuses with movie music", "the light will slow and rise", etc. man i been listenin to this fuckin band too much)

We're so akin to skin

When the boys want in

Boys will be boys

Boys will be poison boys

FFO: Texas is the Reason, old James Dean movies, biking through gated communities, receiving and giving hugs