If you were to divide Rainer Maria’s recording career in two, Look Now Look Again (Polyvinyl, 1999) would be the apex of the first half: on this album, they perfected the sound they had been working towards on the self-titled EP and Past Worn Searching; later releases moved away from the emo and established a more accessible pop aesthetic. This was the first Rainer Maria album I heard, and still the one that I return to the most often. For me, it’s almost a magical recording: it has a perfect blend of musical elements I was drawn to at the time—sensitive, fragile vocals; not-quite-subtle dynamic shifts; healthy mix of upbeat vs. low-key songs—plus it became, for all intents and purposes, a soundtrack to a young adult who was rapidly maturing and facing grown-up decisions. It’s not a record I can be objective about; I know the faults—it’s overwrought, the singing is quite terrible at times (sometimes it’s more like caterwauling), the music gets repetitive over the course of the record, and there’s more spit than sparkle (especially when compared to later releases)—but wasn’t this true of all emo music in the late 1990s? Rainer Maria wasn’t really doing things much differently from other bands at the time—unless you count having a female singer—but in their chosen niche, they were pretty good at what they did.

The album opens with “Rise,” a delicate song that often served as an encore in live sets. Indeed, one of the reasons why this record speaks so well to me is because I’ve seen this band perform these songs at over 20 shows. “Breakfast of Champions” was always a celebratory live performance, as was “I’m Melting!” The one-two punch of “Planetary” and “Broken Radio”—a pair of songs almost always played together live, as on record—always brings a smile, although the lyrics make me cringe more now than a decade ago: “And I’m certain if I drive into these trees / It’ll make less of a mess / Than you’ve made of me” sings Caithlin DeMarrais, intoning a confessional aesthetic that was all but de rigueur a few years later, when emo groups like Bright Eyes and Dashboard Confessional reached success orders of magnitude greater than what Rainer Maria ever attained. The album ebbs and flows around the high points, and although the band made great strides in their musicianship and production in the coming years, I’m pretty sure I’m not alone in thinking that the best songs in the later recordings can’t hold a candle to the worst ones on Look Now Look Again.