Rockpedia
Rock branch Full entry · 1994

Midwest emo

Emerged 1994 Origin Illinois / Kansas, USA Subgenres — Vocals Sung
Heaviness
2
Speed
4
Melody
10

Sung. Melodic singing throughout.

In short

Open tunings and interlocking arpeggios, odd meters and lyrics about autumn and empty rooms.

How it sounds

  • Open tunings and two guitars playing separate, interlocking lines.
  • Odd meters used discreetly, with no display of technique.
  • The occasional trumpet, slow tempos, and lyrics about places and seasons.

Hear what that means

Loaded only when you press play — nothing reaches Google before that. Every second here is the uploader's own, read from the recording's tracklist.

The specifics

Tempo
100-150 bpm
Song length
3.5-6 min
Tuning
Altered and open tunings almost exclusively, chosen so that fretted notes ring against open strings — the harmony that results is the genre's identifying sound.
Production
Warm, close and unpolished, with the guitars clean and separated and the vocal left slightly imperfect. Nothing is compressed hard, so the dynamics of a room stay in.
Written about
Adolescence in retrospect, Place — specifically the suburban Midwest, Failure at intimacy, Weather and seasons

What each part is doing

  • Guitar Two clean parts in altered tunings, arpeggiated and interlocking, with open strings ringing through chord changes so a note that does not belong stays sounding. This is the genre in one technique.
  • Bass Melodic and busy, filling the harmonic space the clean guitars deliberately leave open.
  • Drums Loose, jazz-influenced and comfortable in odd metres the guitars ignore — American Football's drummer is playing in a different time signature much of the time and it never announces itself.
  • Vocals Sung earnestly and imperfectly, frequently by someone who is not really a singer, and mixed inside the band rather than on top of it.
  • Trumpet On the defining record, used as a second voice — one of very few horn parts anywhere on the punk side of this tree.

What it isn't

That the twinkly guitar is the whole idea. The technique gets copied and the reason for it gets lost: those ringing open strings produce suspended chords that never resolve, and the music is about unresolved feeling. Bands who learn the tuning without the harmonic thinking produce something that sounds like the genre and does nothing, which is why there is so much mediocre revival emo and so little good.

Told apart from

  • Emo Midwest emo is the instrumentally intricate wing of emo, with clean interlocking guitars and odd metres rather than post-hardcore's volume.
  • Math rock The same interlocking clean guitars and odd metres, with songs about feelings attached. Many bands are claimed by both.
  • Emo pop Emo-pop takes the subject matter and rebuilds it around a radio chorus. This has no choruses to speak of.
  • Indie rock Shares the amateur singing and the clean guitars, and differs in the harmonic language — the open-tuning ringing is specific to this genre.

The genres this one is most often mistaken for. Written, not derived.

History

In college towns across Illinois and Kansas in the mid-1990s, emo became less aggressive and more attentive to sound. American Football released one album, broke up, and discovered fifteen years later that it had become a cornerstone for an entire generation. The photograph of their house in Urbana is the genre's most recognisable image.

Descended from

Siblings on this branch

Sounds like this, elsewhere in the tree

  • Country rock identical ratings · meets it at Rock
  • Folk rock identical ratings · meets it at Rock
  • Dream pop 1.0 apart by rating · meets it at Rock

Closest by the three ratings, among genres at least 4 steps away in the tree. A rating match is not a musical claim.