Midwest Emo

You're asking about a geography, not a genre. Take DC post-hardcore, drop it into college towns and flat suburbs between Chicago and Kansas City, remove the politics, and let the guitars untangle into two separate parts that never quite play the same thing.

The vocals stop being shouted and start being spoken, mumbled, or cracked — and nobody in the Midwest called it emo at the time.

Chicago, Champaign-Urbana, Milwaukee, Kansas City, roughly 1991 to 2001. Cap'n Jazz formed in Buffalo Grove, Illinois around the Kinsella brothers, Victor Villarreal, Sam Zurick and Davey von Bohlen; the band broke up in July 1995, on the night of a show at Little Rock's Das Yutes a Go-Go, and the members scattered into Joan of Arc, The Promise Ring, Owls and American Football.

Two labels carried it: Jade Tree in Delaware, and Polyvinyl in Illinois. Polyvinyl began in 1994 as Polyvinyl Press, a fanzine by high schoolers Matt Lunsford and Darcie Knight from Danville, Illinois, celebrating the Midwestern DIY scene; the fifth and final issue in May 1996 came with a 20-track compilation, Direction, marking the transition into a record label.

By 2001 the bands were done. Fifteen years later the guitar tunings came back on YouTube and the whole thing restarted as a global DIY style.

Who: the Kinsellas, Davey von Bohlen, Braid's Bob Nanna and Chris Broach, Matt Pryor in Kansas City, Caithlin De Marrais in Madison. Places: VFW halls, the Fireside Bowl in Chicago, basements, college towns.

What: clean or lightly overdriven guitars in alternate and open tunings, two parts interlocking instead of doubling, 6/8 and 5/4 passages, bass carrying the melody, drums that hit hard then drop out.

Lyrics are specific and domestic — street names, seasons, apologies. How a record gets in: it was made cheap, pressed small, and the guitarist retuned rather than used a pedal.