Rainer Maria May Have 2003's Best Album

I’ve been listening to Rainer Maria’s excellent new album over and over as I battle scummy ex-landlords, general winter malaise and all the boxes I still have to unpack in my new apartment, and the music keeps rousing me but also calming me down. It makes me want to fight harder but also just chill the fuck out, and then realize I can and should do both. I know I’d probably have a different reaction to the music if I were listening to it on a beach during a beautifully scorching summer day, but I’d like it just the same.

Long Knives Drawn (Polyvinyl) is a majestic, defiant work. Every song is pretty wonderful, with Caithlin De Marrais’ vocals more dominant then ever. Her voice swoops and soars and just takes over so many moments. She sounds at times like Sleater-Kinney’s Corin Tucker without the unnecessary yelping, and at times like Concrete Blonde’s Johnette Napolitano without the unnecessary sulkiness. But these are easy comparisons, and it doesn’t do Rainer Maria guitarist Kyle Fischer and drummer Bill Kuehn justice to simply compare this band to female-fronted acts.

Rainer Maria may most resemble what the Dismemberment Plan would sound like if they had a female singer and replaced some of their playfulness with something closer to catharsis. Long Knives Drawn has full-on rock moments in the energizing "Ears Ring" and plaintive, folksy reflection in the peaceful "The Awful Truth of Loving." If you want to sort of understand how impressive the range between these songs is, imagine one Conor Oberst album made up of the five best Bright Eyes songs and the four best Desaparecidos songs, with Conor’s wild family circus of collaborators taking turns singing. Point is, Rainer Maria have staked an early claim to Best Album Made by a New York Band in 2003.

This is the No. 1 reason I like the band. Here are some more.

2. When De Marrais and Fischer were a couple (they broke up a year and half ago), they had emotionally draining but ultimately productive fights writing lyrics together. Now the lyrics are pretty much all De Marrais, and Fischer’s fine with that.

"She’s been writing more without input from me," Fischer tells me during a 45-minute chat at Cafe Gitane. "In fact, in this record, I think I wrote two lines and maybe did some light editing. She shows me something, and I’m like, ‘Oh, is this the strongest verb?’"

As for the sound of the record, Fischer says, "we completely revised the process of songwriting, and that’s a big part of why the record sounds the way it does. Previously, we all three came to practice and wrote from scratch in the same room, and Caithlin and I fought over the lyrics. Now it’s more like I came to practice with sort of a verse and a chorus and a guitar worked out. Bill and I would bang that into rough shape because we wanted the record to be more guitar-driven. Caithlin has this incredible melodic sensibility to the extent that if she is present for the original writing of the song on the bass guitar, she’ll hijack the song."

Instead, after Fischer and Kuehn put something together, De Marrais would then add the bass line and also work on lyrics.

"It was the most efficient and seemed to give us a new and more favorable result," Fischer says. "It was quick, and we were sort of trusting each other to do their job and not get in the way."

What’s more, starting on their previous record, Fischer says, "there was a conscious decision for me to step away from the mic because it seemed lyrically inappropriate for a male voice with a great deal of personality to be singing. It wasn’t anymore about what we lovingly sort of called couples rock or, in more cynical moments, the Meat Loaf syndrome. Caithlin was finding these individual stories."

Once the new system was established, making the album was fun and fairly painless.

"We were just excited to be writing again," Fischer says. "The songs just kept getting fiercer and fiercer. ‘Ears Ring,’ the single, is really fast, and that was one of the last things we wrote for the record, so it just kept getting more and more blistering."

3. There’s a wonderful, unheralded downtown band called the IO’s. They’re this lush, new-wave, indie-pop, boy-girl group who are better than, well, half of Jade Tree’s roster. My 17-year-old friend William describes them better than I can: "The IO’s sound like an in-love Weezer, like Rivers Cuomo has a girlfriend and they’re happy together. They sit at home all day and make keyboard-tinged dance-pop versions of the next Weezer album (the proper followup to Pinkerton). Sometimes, they show their joy by singing close harmonies together…ohhh, yeah." The IO’s are still a young band, and I recently asked them what their dream label might be. They said Polyvinyl. I think about that now and think, yeah, that makes perfect sense.

4. In the past, Rainer Maria have looked and seemed like a group of somewhat frumpy, arty kids, but in their latest press photos, they’re all dolled up and look like they’re ready to frolic. Imagine, if you will, Harry, Ron and Hermione five years from now, posing for Wallpaper. Rainer Maria’s pics can be interpreted a lot of ways, and I’m sure emo-afflicted college kids all over the country are doing that right now, but I really just see it as a wise business decision by a savvy band. I also think Rainer Maria just decided to have some fun hamming it up. The photographer was somebody Fischer has dated, and the stylist was another close pal, so it was easy for Rainer Maria to feel relaxed and have a good time with it.

"We were satisfying ourselves creatively," Fischer says. "You see a lot of photos of people in t-shirts and sneakers, leaning up against a brick wall, and we didn’t want that. It’s fine if people want to read into it. Everybody’s like, ‘Dude, what happened to Caithlin? She looks hot!’ …Those in the know will understand the wink."

5. During 2000, when so many creative cats I knew were either recovering from or still chasing their dotcom dreams, Rainer Maria were actually, uh, creating value by dominating college radio. Before any of the New York "scene" bullshit started, Rainer Maria’s album, A Better Version of Me, hit number one on the CMJ charts. The band have been fairly quiet for two years, but they’re veterans who can afford to take their time, given that they’ve quietly grossed something like a million dollars already. They’ve sold more than 80,000 records and played almost 1000 shows in six years, while bands who haven’t sold 5000 records dominate the pages of Shout and New York.

"I like the making-a-living-with-health-insurance part more than the being-famous part," Fischer says. "I feel like our fan base, these are hardcore college-radio-listening…diehard kids who’ve really stuck with it and grown up on it. And in that regard, it kind of is an underground thing. But that said, I feel like our fan base is a much more stable one for that reason."

6. There is a moment all kids go through repeatedly once they start getting their first crushes. They make themselves queasy reliving and imagining moments, and they can’t believe how naive they were last year, last week, yesterday. It takes a long fucking time, probably well into adulthood, before they realize that, really, they were mostly naive for thinking they were so naive, because good crushes are about reinventing the whole damn thing every single time. Rainer Maria’s "The Awful Truth of Loving" is a lovely song about this realization.

7. Okay, so back in 2000, I had just moved to New York and was all-consumed with new-media fakeness and didn’t even notice Rainer Maria. The year was mostly a blur, but I do remember a bunch of people I’ve since lost touch with for all sorts of reasons. It was an insane, once-in-an-epoch time, where everybody (and I include myself in this) was so full of bluster and emotion and hope and bullshit. Listening to Rainer Maria’s songs about living lies and bad relationships and trying to settle the hell down for real makes me think about all that for some reason.

Some of the songs may seem sappy, but it’s sappiness that comes from strength and important life experience. Fischer says that even as he and De Marrais were breaking up, there was almost no question about whether the band would stay together.

"If there was, nobody ever admitted that," Fischer says. "That was the one thing we wanted to keep together. I think it’s a testament to the friendships within the band and the resilience of the bond we had. I think it also has to do with the fact that no one in the band has divorced parents. Nobody has an example in their life of quitting, walking away from a fucked-up relationship."

There was a tough six-or-eight-month span between the ex-lovers, but Fischer now calls De Marrais his best friend and says he’s totally cool with her new boyfriend being the roadie for their upcoming 45-day tour. So maybe the thing is this: moving on is desirable and healthy, but it requires both moving toward something and away from something. It’s nice all that shit’s over, but it’s also nice that it happened too.

Rainer Maria play Thurs.-Fri., Jan. 30-31, at the Bowery Ballroom, 6 Delancey St. (betw. Bowery & Chrystie St.), 533-2111.