Washing Machine: May 8
A pan-genre survey of music for The Washed, featuring Koyo, Action Bronson, Fire-Toolz, Cola, Croz Boyce and Olof Dreijer
I don’t really mean for that sub-hed to be taken literary, or as a synonym for “coworker music.” If you’re checking out Fire-Toolz, you are dialed in enough to beat any Washed Allegations, but the fact is, they’re in their 40s and, even more damning, have engaged in Twitter convos with me about ‘90s emo. I think of this series covering the B-D slots of any given day, Metacritic 78-82s, the stuff that has some juice in the current day but won’t end up in a Kieran Press-Reynolds explainer.
Koyo - Barely Here
I’m trying not to have a villain in my Big 90s Emo Book, because you never know who you’re going to need as a source, you never know what bands the publisher is going to require on the jacket and, above all else, no one was actually battling for “the soul of emo” or whatever. Every interview I’ve done for this thing has to acknowledge, “hey, thank you for participating in this project even though you’ve spent like 25 years trying to convince people you’re not an emo band.”
In a perfect world, Emo Nite Brooklyn-type beats would claim full ownership of the genre and leave the Braids and Promise Rings of the world to be called indie rock or whatever. Which is all they really ever wanted in the first place. The problem is that they ended up getting lumped in with Brand New and Taking Back Sunday and whatnot after they broke up and thus had no meaningful platform to respond.
