(Photo by Sean O’Kane)

Several dudes play under blue, enveloping light, and from the stage they can see no one in the intensity, can only perceive disembodied shouts from the brightness. People yell song titles, which grow unwieldy (“Sell All My Old Clothes, I’m Off to Heaven”) and take on curious meaning in the air, newly contextless, now disconnected phrases, a dialogue anatomized. “It’s nice to see you all again, even though I can’t actually see you,” Anthony Raneri says as he walks onstage, shielding his face from the light with his hands, trying to make out shapes, having invisible conversations. Everyone is from another band (Raneri has Bayside), everyone has downsized their expressions for this purpose—Where’s the Band?, a national tour in which prominent dudes of the emo scene are willingly reduced to an acoustic guitar. They all sing in two voices, one soft and receiving, the other a total unconscious pealing. Clean dimensional crossing.

***

Ace Enders sings for The Early November. In 2008 Ace recorded a solo album that was calibrated for success. He drove to the studio under the impression that he’d play every instrument on the record. He arrived and he saw the instruments, and then he looked again and saw “all these other people.” The record company had hired musicians that guaranteed some kind of success, musicians on break from Nickelback sessions, virtuosos capable of a digital preciseness. Ace didn’t know what to do, had a hard time piecing the facts into a linear sense. He liked the musicians. That was something. Another something: Ace had his job, as a songwriter, and Ace had his family, and was it too much to ask, was it too much work, was it some imperceptible migration into weakness and compromise, that one might finally secure the other. “It’s never coming out,” he says. He shakes his head. “I put two years of my life into it and it’s never coming out.” In the strange, jaded center of his story, his eyes develop a kind of lucid film, all of a sudden, and he starts advising the crowd, disarmingly. “Whatever you believe in… just do it.” Someone yells “ever so sweet,” the first song from the first Early November LP, The Room’s Too Cold. Everyone yells “ever so sweet.” The sounds tangle, become bodiless language, unconscious forming. Ace agrees, with conditions. “If you do it with me,” he says, from a rare place, unanchored from himself, his thoughts newly communal, floating.  “If we’re a family. If we’re the emoest bunch of emos in Brooklyn.”

***

By some delayed magic Evan Weiss lived in a self-reinforcing punk community, at home, in Chicago, a collective of people that understood each other mostly through signifiers. “You knocked on the door,” he says,” and you were handed Something to Write Home About or… My War by Black Flag.” His songs are totally informed by this. He sings from a perspective so tonally fixed that it cannot process others. It’s a typical criticism of emo, that it is anchored self-importantly in the realm of sad dudes. None of the performers really escape the notion so much as recreate its boundaries for themselves. One of Evan’s songs is about sleeping on a friend’s couch with an unwieldy dog. In practice it is about change and weather, mingling, dog erased. Chris Conley plays with near and distant geography (“Last night I dreamt you called from Costa Rica… I woke up to my cold sheets and the smell of New Jersey”) but everything occurs on the interior, along the ribs (“Lungs are breathing open air/ my spleen is dripping from my pants”).

Chris plays an all-requests set, which sort of distorts expectations for Matt Pryor. “I told you guys, the setlist is set in stone,” he says, twice, to a gathered indifference. Whenever Matt plays a song from his solo work, the crowd meet it with conversation, loud and combative. It carries well into “Walking on a Wire,” a Get Up Kids song, from their third album. There is a remonstrative hush, which reduces it to a trimmed, muted babbling, brewed disinterest along the edges. But it communicates something: Among these people, the first two Get Up Kids records are canonized. Everything else is in a unclaimed zone.

***

During Raneri’s set, the crowd clamors for “Winter,” a song about former Bayside drummer John “Beatz” Holohan. In 2006 the Bayside van slid over a patch of ice in Cheyenne, Wyoming and glided freely, out of gravity, into a fluid spin. Holohan died. Raneri ignores the requests, increasingly earnest, until the end of the show. “I wrote ‘Winter,’ and I never play it,” he says. “It’s a personal song and it belongs to me.”

(Photo by Jeff Vier)

She heard a song she hadn’t heard in forever, at least she thought she had, there in the street it had dreamily arrived. It was the pace that revealed her error, how it failed to lapse reliably into pattern, how it weakly absorbed into context; the construction zone around which she walked and the noise of people outside a pizza place had met convincingly in the air. She remembered her uncle knew it, the song, but he had whistled it only; it was necessarily turned, had traveled into him with incident. She tried to remember a record, a name, irrefutable solids. She couldn’t. The people, eating pizza in incredible symmetry, grew immense, sculpted hair, ridges and caverns. Solid geologic ideas in there. The construction beams disciplined with shadow.